


Smells Like Magic

by Twelve (Dodici)



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Indiana Ging, Killua swears, M/M, blood and self-harm (but of the blood-magic kind), canonical zoldyck awfulness, found family trope of doom, greed island but it's played like Magic the Gathering, haphazard magic!AU, hxh big bang 2020, hxhbb, you could read it as friendship but Togashi would be disappointed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:22:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 44,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24981520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dodici/pseuds/Twelve
Summary: A quest to rescue an all-powerful entity trapped inside a teapot sounds exactly like the summer adventure Gon was waiting for. Killua’s pretty eyes are most certainly an added bonus.
Relationships: Gon Freecs & Killua Zoldyck, Gon Freecs/Killua Zoldyck
Comments: 89
Kudos: 113
Collections: Hxhbb





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic would make even less sense if [poeticlump](https://archiveofourown.org/users/poeticlump) didn’t come up with the “Indiana Ging” tag when I was still struggling to explain what the heck I was even trying to write XD
> 
> ANYWAY, you’ll find swearwords! Canonical Zoldyck awfulnessTM! Canonical character death! blood&self-harm (of the blood-magic kind, but it’s there so pls be mindful <3)! What you won’t find is proper worldbuilding, rip.  
> At least for once there’s proper grammar because [subdee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sub_divided) has taken care of that for me!! (if you find mistakes, that’s still on me bc I’m an awful person and I keep on changing sentences three seconds before posting. Yes, I’m a dumbass).

The day it happens, Gon is at school, as he has been for the last dreadful week.

He isn’t exactly inside the school, but the schoolyard sure counts as scholastic enough that he won’t need to lie when Aunt Mito will ask him if he skipped class.

The shiny shades of blue and green on the back of the beetle flicker for a moment. All the colors around it wear off, leaving everything trapped inside some kind of misty photograph in tones of sepia. 

“What,” Gon says, as the beetle takes off, buzzing. Then the flash comes, it engulfs everything in a bubble of saturated ozone and obliterates the school yard and the beetle, the grass and Gon’s own body like he’s never been there in the first place.

Then it’s one stretched second that must be what eternity feels like, and Gon is again Gon, colors right, knees on grass and mouth agape.

“What,” he repeats. The beetle is on its back, legs moving frantically in the air. The boy is on his back, too. He must be a ghost, he checks all the boxes.

“It worked,” the ghost says, surprised. And then promptly proceeds to pass out.

* 

There is so much more blood than what Gon is usually accustomed to, even after a childhood spent grating himself onto every available abrasive surface.

Since it was coming mostly from the not-so-ghostly ghost’s arms, Gon bandaged those up before plastering band-aids a bit randomly on any other bump and scratch. He attaches the last one on a scraped temple and contemplates his options.

“Cold water.” He tells it aloud, to the rusty faucet that sticks out from the wall; there’s a rubber hose attached, coiled up right beside plenty of buckets and mops. Hot water wouldn’t do, because then the proteins in the blood would bind and set even worse inside the fabric. It must be something Kite told him, because he’s usually the one who provides him with cool information.

Gon has managed to clean up at least the old wooden floor of the cabin, grateful that apparently Mister Tonpa, the janitor, is nowhere to be found. He’s still trying to kick the hose in a messy curl on the ground when the ghost stirs with a pretty lively moan.

“What the fuck,” it’s the first thing he says, propped up on one elbow as he presses a palm on his forehead.

“I don’t really think you’re a ghost,” Gon says, sure. He doesn’t smell like he’s dead, that’s for sure. He smells like ozone, actually—and blood, of course.

“Because I’m not one—what are you?”

It’s a weird question. Gon looks down at his t-shirt; the Greenpeace logo is smeared with fresh blood.

“I’m a person. If you’re not a ghost you must be a wizard, then. I’m Gon, nice to meet you.”

The wizard squints at him, his eyes are a thunderous blue, and maybe he’s going to turn Gon into a frog right then and there. Instead, he turns around, sitting straighter on the old, sloppy gym mattress Gon had dragged him onto.

“I’m not a wizard, why would you say that. And where the hell are we?” His voice is business-like, as if he wasn’t pretty intent on bleeding his life out just a handful of minutes ago. Gon isn’t actually sure if his skin color isn’t one step away from cyanosis or just like that.

“We’re in the janitor’s cabinet, it’s where the closest first-aid kit was… I mean, it’s not a cabinet, it’s a storage room. It’s not even exactly a room, because it’s outside the school, but—”

“School? Why the heck a school,” the wizard says, and he’s already standing up, just for a dizzy spell to slap him back onto the mattress.

“You should be careful, there’s more blood outside than inside you, I think.”

The wizard growls, eyes sealed as he tries to center himself.

“Well, thank you very much for your assessment.”

Ah, sarcasm. Gon’s getting better at detecting it; still, most of the time he doesn’t know how to respond, so he searches inside his pockets and pulls out an old toffee—it must be one of those chili-flavored monstrosities Spinner brought back from her last trip.

“Here, this will do until we find you something to eat.” He hands the gum out, just as non-threatening as he would be while trying to approach a wild fox. The wizard is looking at him like Gon is in fact a truck with xenon-powered headlights. “You’re hungry, right? So, what’s a wizard doing here?”

He doesn’t answer, but he does snatch the candy away with a movement as swift as a draft of wind.

Gon realizes he forgot to warn him about the flavor only after he started to splutter.

“Yeah, sorry, it’s not good. Apparently they’re a thing in Kakin, though.”

“At least warn me, what the fuck!”

“Don’t swear,” Gon says, serious. “And don’t be loud, I was supposed to be in class right now, you know? So, you haven’t told me your name yet—”

“It’s Killua.” Gon hopes he’s heard well, since Killua is still sputtering toffee. “You said we’re in a school, why a school out of all places? And you’re—”

“I’m Gon!” He doesn’t mind repeating, not as long as he can carry on the conversation. It’s like talking to a cloud, white fluffy hair and eyes like lightning and Gon thinks he might be suddenly invested in another human being for the first time in his short but intense life of being an animal lover. 

If Killua is even human. He definitely acts like he is, so it must be okay to treat him as such unless he tells otherwise.

“So, was it magic, the thing you did before?”

If not by blood loss, then Killua is going to be killed by that toffee; still, his eyes are lively and sharp when he points at himself.

“Why do you think _I_ did that?”

Gon frowns.

“Because you suddenly appeared out from nowhere?”

“So what,” says Killua, eyes squinted. “You believe in magic?”

Gon looks at the dusty opaque window; there’s a contorted shiny spider web there, it dangles from the ceiling like a curtain. 

“I think I do,” he says then. “I wasn’t sure before, but you appeared out of nowhere so I think I was right. Also, you were bleeding a lot, and I know that blood magic is a thing.”

Killua looks at his own bandaged arms.

“That’s… pretty surprisingly logical.”

“So you’re, like, a magician?” Gon insists, trying not to bounce too much on his heels.

Killua reacts like he’s been insulted.

“No way! I’m a sorcerer, thank you very much. And I’m searching for something, it must be here otherwise I wouldn’t end up in a place like this…”

“Here inside the school, you mean?”

Killua shrugs. He looks super cool and ready to take over the world for someone who was dying of untimely blood loss on the ground just a few minutes ago.

“If this is a school, then yes, it must be here.”

Gon nods, pensive. 

“Well, there aren’t that many people around because it’s summer…”

“So what are you doing here?” Killua asks, and Gon blinks, caught off guard.

“I was supposed to be doing summer math lessons, but I found a wonderful stag beetle and I kinda forgot that I had class.”

“A stag beetle,” Killua says.

“Is the thing you’re searching for a stag beetle?”

“It’s not,” Killua says.

“Too bad. Stag beetles are awesome. Is the thing you’re searching for…”

“Stop it, I won’t tell you anyway.”

“But how can I help you find the thing if I don’t know what the thing is?”

Killua blinks, like he’s trying to process his words. It’s something that happens—Gon has that effect on people sometimes. He waits looking Killua directly in the eyes; they’re also really pretty, so it isn’t an unpleasant task.

“For Satan’s sake, stop it,” Killua says, flustered. “You’re really weird, you know? Okay, listen, you can help. But if you find the thing, you absolutely can’t…”

Then the door explodes, and Knuckle’s pompadour bulges inside like it’s a battering ram. Two baseball bats fall onto each other with a thud the exact same moment Killua inhales sharply and vanishes into thin air. 

Gon’s jaw falls down and bounces around when Knuckle starts shaking him from the shoulders.

“Here you are! Are you trying to kill me with worry?”

Gon endures the yell and also the crying spell, but he’s still looking at the mattress over Knuckle’s shoulders.

There’s a pressure on it, the plastic carving the figure of someone sitting there. 

“I’m sorry Knuckle, I just got distracted, I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

“Jeez, Gon, you can’t do things like that, you know? You have to actually be there for the lessons or you aren’t going to pass math. What would your aunt say, then? Or Kite?”

“I know, I know, it’s just… Math is so difficult.” He looks at the weird way the light falls on the place Killua should have been. His form is almost transparent, like the strands from a cobweb. 

Knuckle doesn’t seem to notice at all, he pats Gon on the head with affection. 

“Come on, we still have half an hour, I bet I can teach you a cool way to do fractions and stuff.”

He sounds so enthusiastic that Gon doesn’t find it in himself to let him down. 

He steps out into the sun and nothing has changed in the yard apparently. Those few kids who are there to attend their make-up summer classes must still be dying of boredom inside the building. 

Knuckle closes the door and Gon finds himself hoping oh so hard that he didn’t imagine the whole thing.

*

Knuckle was the first one to get it, that Gon wasn’t dumb—just really troubled when it came to numbers. 

They don’t make sense still, digits and sums, quantities that interact with other quantities and how much are they truly? Gon doesn’t know, but Knuckle never tells him he should just study more, like re-reading the same lines forever is going to magically make sense one day. Instead, they break down every single exercise into the most basic operations—it’s a painstakingly long and tiring process and Gon still can’t add numbers inside his head and he keeps on forgetting minus signs all over the place, but at least he doesn’t feel hopelessly _dumb_.

He’s still pretty easily distracted, though. 

“Gon, buddy, multiplication first, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure, sorry…” Here it is—here _he_ is.

Gon’s neck prickles with static. He raises his chin up and there, over Knuckle’s shoulder, Killua is opening the cabinet and looking inside with a scowl. 

“Everything okay?” Knuckle asks, wary. He asked what the dark splotches on Gon’s shirt were, too, and Gon had to invent a convoluted story about stag beetles and mud. Not extremely convincing, but since the actual explanation is ‘a magical person bled all over me’ it’s not like Gon had that many alternatives.

His only alternative right now is deadpanning. He adds a smile because those are always a good idea.

“Yeah, sure! I think I got it now, it’s…” The air frizzles and Killua is gone again, right before Knuckles turns around with a tilted eyebrow. He sighs, and then points at the clock.

“I guess it’s enough for today, really. No reason to make myself hated over algebra if you’re tired… Same time tomorrow?”

Gon nods, and he’s already speed-gathering notebooks and pencils.

“Yeah. I mean, thanks. You’re really super helpful, really.”

Knuckle sighs.

“You’re a good kid, Gon. Really.”

Then it’s done and Gon can finally trot out of the classroom. He’s already sprinted for half the hall when he catches a glimpse of silver and frizzly air.

He jumps inside the room yelling Killua’s name.

He thought he was going to fall onto him or at least catch up to him, but Killua is already behind his back, hissing with a finger raised over his lips. 

“Fuck, would you please mind your fucking voice?”

“Don’t swear,” Gon says, serious because it’s a serious matter, at least so Aunt Mito says. “It isn’t cool, just impolite.”

Killua looks at him like he’s talking garbage. He shakes his head and grunts. 

“I’ll swear as much as I want, thank you very much, you…”

“But you’re so cool! You shouldn’t.”

Killua blinks.

“You don’t even know me… Listen,” he says, and sneak-peeks over the door before closing it cautiously behind his shoulders. The classroom is empty and just as much greenish and dull as the one Gon was taking his math lesson in. “I need to find this thing. It’s super important and it must be here, otherwise I wouldn’t be here myself, so…”

“Yeah, you told me. I want to help!” For some reason, this makes Killua frown. 

“You don’t need to…”

“Oh, but I want to! You’re a wizard, so…”

“Sorcerer. I’m a-”

“Yeah, well, I think it’s awesome! I definitely want to help you find your thing. But I can’t really help you if you don’t explain at least a bit to me… I don’t need details, just, what does this thing look like? Is it small or big? Is it…”

Killua grunts again, nose wrinkling, and Gon decides that it’s the most endearing thing he’s ever seen.

“You don’t have to meddle with it,” is Killua saying then, and it sounds like an admonition. “It’s dangerous and you’re a human or whatever and humans don’t get to meddle with this kind of stuff. Dangerous things happen when they do. Like the Inquisition or Cats.”

“Cats?”

“The musical,” Killua says, without changing expression. “What I mean is, you should forget about even seeing me, okay?”

“But I don’t want to!” That wouldn’t be right—Gon doesn’t want to live this thing alone. “I know this school way better than you for sure, I can help. Everybody apart from the janitors should be going home right now, it’s the best moment to start a search, I guess. I think we should make a plan, start from the top floor and come down.”

Killua eyes him like he’s out of his mind.

“It’s a good strategy,” Gon says, head tilted.

“Whatever,” Killua says, and it sounds a lot like he’s agreeing with him.

That’s how they start searching top floor to bottom, every locker and drawer and shelf. Gon takes up books and pencils and old dusters to ask if they are the object they’re searching for only to watch Killua’s forehead growing more wrinkled by the minute.

In the middle of the second floor he begins to act so frantic that Gon has to at least try to put back on the shelves the stuff Killua started throwing around. He makes an entire cupboard shake with a frustrated growl and a razzle-dazzle that sparks electricity and smells of ozone, like an actual storm is going to happen then and there, inside the small classroom.

Killua mumbles something to himself, definitely unhappy. He rustles in between books and old papers. He jumps, impossibly high like he’s actually flying, to inspect the dusty space over the drawer, only to come back down with an even unhappier face. 

“There’s nothing here… I don’t have time.” By then he’s openly grumbling, or at least so Gon thinks until he detects the true source of the sound. 

“Was that your stomach?” Gon asks, and he’s already trying to detect the sound again by putting his ear onto Killua’s belly, like you do when you’re trying to hear steps inside the forest. He receives a heartfelt slap on the cheek. 

“What the heck are you doing!”

“Sorry, I was just checking. Here,” he adds, and he’s already searching inside his backpack. “Wait, I should still have…”

“I don’t have time for…“ Killua starts, slightly hysteric, only to be interrupted again by another loud growl. He puts both his hands on his belly, ashamed. 

Gon has fished the lunchbox out of his backpack.

“Here, Aunt Mito gave me lunch, but I forgot to eat it because I was distracted by that stag beetle.”

“You really are obsessed with that stag beetle.”

Gon grins, still holding out his lunch. Killua looks uncertain, eyes shifting to the smiling frog on the lid of the box like he’s scared it’s going to jump on his face.

“It’s your lunch,” he says. “You should eat it.”

“We can share.”

“There’s only one fork,” Killua insists, even though his stomach is still going on pretty loud. 

Gon takes the lid off, still grinning. The smell is awesome even after two whole hours: Aunt Mito really is the best cook. 

“It’s meatballs, we don’t need forks. Actually, it’s fishballs, because Aunt Mito works at the fish market.”

“Does she,” Killua says, weakly. “You’re crazy,” he adds, studying one fishball with open distrust.

His eyes get huge at the first bite and Gon flashes him a proud smile.

“I know, they’re the best. She won contests. She should open a restaurant, that’s what we’re always telling her.”

“Why he hell ‘hen’t arr’eady?”

“What?” He laughs as Killua tries not to choke on his fishball.

He swallows and coughs; his stomach is protesting again.

“Why the hell hasn’t she already! Opened a restaurant, I mean.” He accepts another helping with way less qualms. “These are incredible!”

“Take as many as you want, I had a big breakfast.”

Killua gives him a look that Gon doesn’t really get—something between pure disbelief and absolute bliss. It makes Gon’s stomach flip, but it definitely isn’t hunger; more like a swarm of stag beetles fluttering under his diaphragm. 

He munches on some carrots while Killua demolishes his whole bento box with the enthusiasm of someone who didn’t eat for days. Gon doesn’t ask if that’s the case; Killua is already pretty wary and it really feels like any attempt to pry would end up upsetting him.

“Thanks a lot,” he says, when he’s finished. “This must have been the best thing ever after chocolate. You don’t happen to have some chocolate on you, do you?”

Gon shakes his head.

“But there are vending machines on the ground floor.”

Killua nods like this is a matter that needs a lot of pondering. 

“We should maybe get there too… Right now, let’s start searching again!” he decides, and he’s already jumped up. 

*

The enthusiasm runs dry pretty fast.

They’ve searched inside every single classroom and bathroom and broom closet from the third to the ground floor at this point; the school is deserted and the sun is way lower, casting a deep shade of gold and yellow through the windows. They’ve even paused enough to empty the whole content of Gon’s pockets inside the vending machines, to get three packets of Chocorobots and a Kitkat they munched on while inspecting an entire corridor, but it’s like even chocolate’s energy is now finished inside Killua’s bones.

“I don’t get it,” he says, frowning in front of the umpteenth open drawer. “It has to be here.”

“There are places I’ve never been in this school, you know?” Gon is really doing his best to think. “Like, the headmaster’s office or the archive, or…”

Killua throws a book away.

“Good, then it must be there… Where are these places?”

“Students aren’t allowed to go there, that’s the problem.”

“Well,” Killua says, hands on his sides and a mischievous smile. “I’m not a student, you know?”

Gon opens his mouth. Then he closes it up and shrugs.

“It makes sense, I guess. We must be quiet, though, I’d really like not to get in trouble, my Aunt Mito doesn’t like it when I do.”

Killua is already pushing him out of the door.

“Come on, let me see where these places are.”

The headmaster’s office is down on the ground floor. To get there, they must pass in front of the janitor’s desk.

No one really likes Mister Tonpa and Gon can understand why, from a rational point of view. He doesn’t like to not like people, though, at least if they never did something specifically hurtful toward him or others. 

Tonpa is there, feet on the desk to clip off his toenails. 

“Ew, gross,” Killua says, pointy chin stuck on Gon’s hair. It’s a weird feeling, it’s making him giggle internally, like this is some kind of super-secret mission—it is, for Killua, so Gon decides he must act accordingly. 

“Mister Tonpa would for sure try to stop us. We must distract him if we want to pass,” he says. 

Killua nods over his head. 

“Okay, what could be distracting enough? I mean, what is he even doing there?”

“Working, I guess? He’s… he surveilles the halls and he answers the phone and stuff like that, I think.”

They keep the silence for a bit, legs crossed and foreheads close while they both reflect.

“Power outage?” Killua says, an index finger raised.

Gon frowns; he throws a look outside, where the sun is still pretty bright.

“I’m not sure he would even notice.” 

Killua sighs, shoulders slouching.

“You’re right… But,” he adds, finger raised still. “What about a storm. He’ll have to go close some windows at the very least.”

Gon nods, knuckles pressed on his lips. 

“Well, yeah, but it’s sunny outside.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem at all. Just… Give me a bit of space or I’ll zap you too.”

That’s—okay. Gon shifts a couple meters away while Killua too crawls across the floor to get to the nearest window. Tonpa is still intent on clipping his particularly tenacious toe nails. 

Killua stops right under a sunbeam with a frown on his face, murmuring something that really doesn’t sound like a language Gon knows. 

At first it’s just silly, Killua sitting down there mumbling like he’s trying to win some kind of argument with himself; then something shifts and Gon gets again that odd impression of something ready to happen, an anticipation sparking inside his stomach just right before the world goes once again sepia. It freezes before his eyes for less than half a second, before everything is back to normal.

“What did you—”

The sky thunders, then, and the light changes abruptly, like a big cloud has appeared right over the school, eating up that sunbeam that was softening Killua’s features to leave him wrapped in a cold, sharp light instead, hair frizzling with static. He grins.

“Done. We just have to wait now.”

“Awesome, Killua!” Gon says, as the thunder grows in volume. Tonpa stops his disgusting activity for a bit, looking outside with a scowl.

“Fucking climate change,” he says, and Gon and Killua end up choking down laughter into each other’s hands. 

Killua hushes him like he wasn’t making exactly the same amount of noise. 

They both get startled when some windows slams somewhere inside the building, but Tonpa gets startled too and Gon grins, excitement growing.

“He’s going to go look,” he says. “We’ll have…”

“Oh, fuck,” Killua says, because, well, even Aunt Mito would have allowed the imprecation in this case. “He’s coming this way.”

He is, toward the very open, fully slamming window right over their own heads.

“For how long can you hold your breath?” Killua asks, out of the blue and shaking Gon’s shoulders.

“Ah… Almost ten minutes, I used to go free diving a lot when I was…”

“Awesome, you hold it at my three. One, two…” Gon inhales, not as much as he would have liked to, Killua mirroring his movements. He mouths a three when Tonpa’s foot is already inside the classroom. Gon almost lets his air go because they’re right there in full display, and Killua slams a hand over his mouth. They stay there, huddled together on the floor while Tonpa looks around as if the classroom was empty; his steps are loud and fast to get to the window, to close the storm outside.

“Ridiculous,” he mumbles to himself. And groans at the sound of rain and thunders coming from every other classroom. “You have to be kidding me!” he protests, but he stomps out of the room, almost running.

“I’ve never seen him run,” Gon whispers, once he’s out. Killua hits him hard on the head. “Ouch, why did you do that!”

“Dumbass, the spell fails if you talk!”

“What… Oh,” Gon realizes, hands pressed on his head. “Were we invisible?”

Killua sighs hard, but nods.

“It was more like a chameleon thing, we just blended in with our surroundings. Invisibility is way more difficult.”

“That’s super useful! We should have used that from the start!”

“It’s useful if you’re sitting still, but it’s easy to spot if you’re moving around. Also, since you have to hold your breath, it’s sure more difficult to do if you’re walking… Don’t make me waste time with dumb explanations, now. Let’s go!”

They walk stealthily through the hall, while the tempest insists on raging over the school. That was such an awesome magic, Gon couldn’t even start to wrap his head around it.

“Here, that’s the archive. And the headmaster’s office is… But we should have taken the keys from Mister Tonpa’s office!”

Killua raises his chin up, a smug smile on his face.

“Don’t underestimate me, human,” he says, with the tone of someone who has read a bit too many fantasy books. Gon isn’t that much adept at reading, but he knows he’s kidding, maybe having a bit too much fun during this task just like he himself. 

“You know a magic word to open door?”

“Of course I do and don’t call it magic word,” Killua says. “It’s a charm.”

Duly noted. Gon watches as Killua imposes his hand onto the doorknob just like he was trying to open it manually, but once again the air frizzles around him and the time stops for a fraction of a second, like the shutter click of an old, analog camera. 

The lock opens up and the door creeps on its hinges.

“Let’s take a look inside,” Killua says, ready. 

*

There is nothing. Nothing at all.

Gon opened drawers and lockers and files. He read his own just out of boredom when Killua was starting to get a bit obsessive and looking everywhere, hair frizzling with magic and ears tense, like he was expecting to hear someone calling for him.

Gon looks at his own notes and tests from last year; so apparently they decided he was in need of ‘special education’ in math—that makes a lot of sense and also explains Knuckle. 

“Found something interesting?” Killua asks, voice strained.

“Apparently I might have this thing called dyscalculia. It would make a lot of sense.”

“Is it some kind of, what, illness?”

“I don’t feel sick,” Gon says. “So I guess not. I sometimes feel a bit sick when I do math, maybe it’s that.”

Killua doesn’t look convinced.

“Well, don’t drop dead on me, okay? Why didn’t they tell you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s serious. Maybe I’m dying.”

“Do you feel like you’re dying?”

Gon checks his arms and legs and presses his nose with the pad of a finger.

“No, not really,” he decides.

Killua studies him with his head tilted, arms crossed.

“Is pushing your own nose a diagnostic exam? Don’t answer.” He sighs. “Let’s try to have a look inside the headmaster’s of—”

“Who’s in there!” 

Gon says “no one!” inside Killua’s palm. Killua hits him on the head with the same hand and then instructs him to hold his breath once again. 

Tonpa’s steps are heavy on the ground. Gon looks at his shoes walking around the archive like they have a temper of their own. 

Killua looks at him, and Gon’s got an understanding that, as long as they’re touching, they’ll be able to see each other too. Killua is still holding his breath, but he mouths something, a couple fingers mimicking a stroll toward the door. 

Gon nods. They move quietly around the desk while Tonpa is busy checking that the windows are closed. 

Killua drags both himself and Gon over the door, and there, standing still, he shuts it close. 

“Fuck,” they can hear Tonpa say, in a snort. And then a louder fuck when Killua touches the doorknob again and the door locks with a click.

“But he’s got the keys,” Gon says, cautious.

Killua is twirling the key ring around his finger. He grins.

“No, he doesn’t.”

Gon looks at him, mouth agape, as Tonpa starts rattling the doorknob while muttering colorful curses under his breath.

They have to run then, mostly because neither Killua nor Gon seem able to stop laughing. 

“We can’t leave him there,” Gon says. “It’s cruel.”

“I know, I know, I’ll free him when we’re done… Look inside the drawers.”

They look inside the drawers, while the weather is still trying to eradicate the whole school building from its own base. They look and they search; Gon stops to ask for every single thing that could be of interest: weird paperweight and pen holder and boxes and post-it notes. 

“It isn’t here,” Killua says, seated down on the floor. More like collapsed, looking tired and sad—it isn’t funny anymore, if Killua is sad.

“Maybe if you could explain at least a bit…” Gon starts once again, but then something bangs inside the hall.

“One of the windows?” he says, but at that point Tonpa is already stomping inside the room, a broom held like a spear.

Killua has snapped his finger fast, to short-circuit the ceiling light, and then he slams himself over Gon, to press him on the wall. 

They’ve already breathed in to vanish together, while Tonpa hit the switch uselessly a dozen times.

“What the heck is happening inside this stupid school?” he grumbles. “Who’s there!”

He’s talking to an empty office at that point, because Gon has already dragged Killua with him inside the adjacent room, crowded with files and desks and shelves just like the other one and still as lacking in whatever it is that Killua is searching for. 

They wait there in silence until Tonpa’s mumbles are once again at least an entire hall away. 

“I knew it,” Killua says then, voice low and dark. “I knew it wasn’t here, I just… I had to be sure.”

The weather, it’s starting to quiet down; it’s like the storm has lost its intensity just like Killua himself, who’s now openly brooding, chin on his knees and brows furrowed.

Gon looks at the slices of sky popping out of the clouds, sun low and orange in the reflection of the window.

“It’s starting to get late. I think we should try and search better tomorrow, maybe there’s someplace we haven’t looked yet.”

Killua looks at him instead, over the rim of his messy fringe of fuzzy silvery hair. 

“Maybe,” he says, but he sounds every bit unsure. “I don’t understand. Where could it be? I’m going to fucking kill Milluki...”

Gon has at least half a million questions buzzing inside his head at the moment, but he’s also pretty sure that he isn’t going to get an actual answer, not now. Not with Killua looking so pale and tired and upset. 

“You do like fish, right?” he asks then, searching his face for an honest answer.

He finds surprise, mostly, but it’s also a different expression than the sad one that was there before, and that’s pretty good.

“Fish? What kind of fish.”

“I’m not sure, but I guess octopus? Do you like octopus?”

Killua blinks a couple times, puzzled, but he doesn’t make a disgusted face. Gon grins, because that too seems pretty good to him.

*

Octopus and potatoes, it’s one of Mito’s most famous dishes. 

“It will be cold, wouldn’t it be better if I made something else? Like a sandwich?”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Gon says, and fills his lunch box with as much soup as he can. “It will be alright.”

“Wouldn’t the other kids…” she starts, tentatively. Gon stops her in her tracks. 

“I’m basically always alone with Knuckle anyway. And I don’t really mind.” It’s the truth. Whatever the other kids think of him—that he’s weird for sure, because he loves insects and brings octopus soup for lunch—he doesn’t really mind. They’re generally okay to him, they aren’t exactly friends, but they’re on friendly terms, which is totally alright. Gon was a bit disappointed when he understood that none of his classmates shared his passion for animals and wild plants and activities like climbing trees and following tracks and fishing. But that’s okay: Gon is happy when he has a project and today the most incredible of all projects appeared right in front of him. It’s been a very positive day overall, math included. 

He closes his lunch box and then collects a spoon.

“I’d like to go sleep in the tree house today, if that’s okay with you, Aunt Mito?”

She stops sweeping up the floor with a serious expression on her face. 

Gon is trying his level best to not look too excited. Spoon balanced over the lunchbox, he smiles and waits and hopes. 

Mito sighs.

“Go… But bring some more blankets, you heard that storm this afternoon? It was so sudden, I was pretty scared, I have to admit.”

“Oh, it was fine!” That’s pretty cryptic even for his standards. He grins angelically at Aunt Mito’s tilted eyebrow and then announces that he’s going to bring some stuff to the tree house and thanks for the dinner.

“Killua!” he yells, when he’s finally up. 

Killua’s like a startled cat; he hisses at him, a finger planted on his mouth.

“Don’t make me jinx you, you moron!”

“Oh, sure, right, you’re incognito,” Gon says, and puts the lunchbox down. “Sorry, I forgot.”

“I’m not… Hell, do what you want. Didn’t you say you went to get supplies?” He looks every bit like a soldier waiting inside a foxhole, which is a funny concept given that they’re up in a tree instead. Gon is pretty proud of his tree house, Kite helped him build it when they moved from Whale Island; it isn’t like sleeping in the forest, but at least it’s outdoor enough to keep his wanderlust at bay without making Aunt Mito sick with worry.

Gon beams, spoon in hand. “I got you some soup, sorry to make you wait!”

Killua’s eyes narrow to a couple of slits, blue barely visible. He’s removed all the bloody bandages and probably did something magical with his injuries, because they’re not bleeding anymore—just clear cut reddish marks sticking out from the rim of his crumpled t-shirt.

“Soup. You got me soup.”

“Yes. You’re welcome,” Gon says, with only a tad bit of irony. “Eat. I’m going back to bring some other stuff, pillows and the like.”

Killua doesn’t really look like he’s following him. He’s eyeing the lunchbox and its content with open distrust, so Gon points at it too, as eloquently as possible.

“Eat.” Maybe he’s acting a bit like Killua is some kind of wild animal to rescue, but that’s because animals are what he knows best. “You’ll like it for sure, Aunt Mito made it. I’ll be right back, okay?”

He doesn't even have his foot on the first rung of the ladder when Killua jumps over the lunchbox to grab his wrist instead.

“I can’t… For Satan’s sake, listen. That thing, it really is important. Super important. More important than my life or your life as far as I care, so…”

Gon shrugs.

“Well, that’s a pretty rude thing to say. I’m sure we’ll find it. Tomorrow we can search better…”

“I don’t have until tomorrow!” Killua says. “I came here with you because I didn’t really know where to go, but I can’t…”

“You don’t know where to find the thing, am I right?” Gon says, sure. “We need a plan. And you need to sleep if you want to think straight. And get some dinner too, those fishballs weren’t enough for sure. So, please, eat,” he repeats, a bit more forceful. “Before it gets cold.”

Apparently, his infamous stubbornness is a thing: Killua looks at him and then simply nods. He accepts the spoon, and Gon smiles. 

He takes another blanket, just to be sure, and a pillowcase that doesn’t smell at all. Then he stays in the kitchen for a bit, conflicted, until he decides to get a glass of milk too.

Aunt Mito looks at him like she does sometimes when he’s acting weird. 

“Gon,” she says, stopping him in his tracks. He almost fears she’s going to stop him for good, order him to sleep inside on his very comfortable bed, but she simply slips a little yellow bottle in between the bundle of sheets that Gon is carrying. 

“It’s for the mosquitos, spray it on yourself please.”

“Oh, thanks Aunt Mito!”

She doesn’t really say “whatever,” but it’s impressed in the angles of her brows as she pinches him on the cheek and sighs back to the kitchen, where Abe is already asleep on the couch.

Gon should help to get her in bed, but Killua—he’s like a prickling on his neck, like there’s a thread linking them, the hook is deep inside Gon’s brain and Killua’s got the fishing rod stable in his hands. 

He throws one last glance at the light-ish square of the kitchen door but then is already outside, stumbling on his feet to keep his load of blankets and pillows from falling. 

He puts everything in the basket and secures it with a double knot before he starts climbing, so excited he feels like he’s vibrating out of his own body. He manages not to spill the milk and that alone is a bit of a small magic. 

When he gets back to the wooden floor of the tree house, the lunchbox is empty and the spoon is clean. 

“Did you like it?” 

Killua doesn’t answer, but he does put the spoon back inside the box and accepts the milk without a fuss.

“Gon!”

They both freeze, Killua with the glass in his hand and a question on the tip of his tongue.

Gon sticks his head out of the window.

“Yes, Aunt Mito?”

“Are you sure it isn’t too cold out here?” she asks, a sweater on her shoulder and a worried expression on her face.

“I’ll be fine! I took a lot of blankets!” He points at the pulley, basket full of blankets.

“You’ll come back inside if it gets too cold. Promise.”

“I promise, Aunt Mito!” He nods so much he almost falls off the tree. “You need something else? Sorry for leaving the dishes to you,” he adds, because he feels pretty sorry about that, for real. 

She stays there for one, two, three seconds more looking at him from below with one of her worried expressions, like she’s trying to understand what’s going on inside his head – and most of the time it really is just insects and what if different species could mate, would something like a foxbear be more similar to a bear or a fox? Stuff like that. She worries a lot, though. Gon feels pretty guilty over it most of the time.

“It’s okay, dear. Just… Call me if you need anything at all, okay?”

“Sure thing!” Gon chirps. He sighs, watching her go back inside. 

The sighturns into a sneeze, because it’s actually pretty cold outside and it can’t be all Killua’s fault. They should definitely make a fort, that’s what he’s thinking when he turns back inside and the tree house is empty.

“Killua?” he calls, in a whisper.

“Is she gone?” The answer comes from… there, right beside the trunk, where a tall glass of milk is floating mid-air. 

It’s incredible to watch: Killua’s head reappears and with it his hands and clothes and shoes, like someone has painted the colors back on him. 

“Was she the lady you stole the soup from?” Killua asks, a bit on edge.

“Oh, but I didn’t steal it. She gave it to me, for lunch.”

Killua looks at him and back at the empty lunchbox like he isn’t really following the situation. 

“You live with her?”

“Yes,” Gon says. “And with Abe, Mito’s grandmother. She’s really old, so she goes to sleep pretty early, but she’s also a lot of fun. You’d like her, she knows the best stories about magic.”

“Okay.” Killua breathes like he had forgotten how to do it properly. “Why milk, though.”

“It’s for the cookies,” Gon says. Sorcerers are pretty silly folks, or maybe it’s just Killua—or maybe it’s Gon. Sometimes, when he thinks that everybody is being silly, it’s because he’s the silliest one apparently. 

Anyway, he takes the jar out and the cocoa powder too; Killua shares his milk with him, which is awesome, and they use it to dip the cookies in. 

Killua turns toward him, to study him like he’s such a strange creature and Gon feels almost ashamed. That’s the look he gets sometimes, from teachers and other kids and random people when he says something weird; sometimes even Aunt Mito looks at him like that and… Killua is laughing. 

“You’re so weird!” he says, delighted. “It makes a lot of sense. And these are even better than the soup?”

“Aren’t they?” Gon says, way happier. Maybe he is weird—and that’s fine. Killua doesn’t seem to mind, it’s more like he finds him interesting instead. “Abe baked them. She doesn’t do it as much as she used to because of her arthritis, but she’s still the best.”

Killua nods, munching on his fifth cookie.

“Cool. I really was starving, you know?” he adds, after a bit of pause. “Thanks.”

“No problem! Ehi, Killua.” The question has been whirling inside his head from the first moment—f actually, since _ever_. “Can someone like me learn to do magic?”

Killua tilts his head like the information is somewhat heavy and he needs a bit of concentration and a lot of carbohydrates to process it. 

“Well, it’s pretty complicated… I know there are humans who can obtain something akin to magic, usually through an artifact of some kind,” he tells, somber. “But sorcerer, you must be born one to be one.”

Gon feels his chin coming down. 

“I understand,” he says, pensive. He gets up and go pull the rope, pulley squeaking in the dark, until the basket is at arm-length to be carried inside.

They end up building a pillow-fort using the trunk of the tree as a pillar. Killua mumbles something and the sheet starts floating above their heads, like invisible bobby pins are keeping it there. 

“Awesome.” Gon has said it at least five times. He grins, back on the old mattress that is always there, but made way cozier by the army of pillows and soft blankets that they have arranged to block every cold draft from the outside. “I’d really like to do magic too,” he says once again, switching on his old LED flashlight there with them to make some soft light inside the fort. “It looks awesome.”

“It’s pretty awesome,” Killua says, admiring his handiwork—magic-work? “It can also be pretty fucking difficult, though.”

He yawns, thoughtful, and Gon isn’t really sure what kind of difficult he’s talking about, so he starts with the simplest kind of difficult he can think of.

“Isn’t it going to fall on our head as fast as you fall asleep?” 

Killua blinks and his bright eyes turn toward him.

“Of course not, it’s enchanted.” He explains it like it’s the most common thing ever. “It’s going to stay like this for quite sometimes. I’ll have to disenchant it when I get up,” he adds, as an afterthought, right before letting out another contagious yawn.

“You know, you didn’t need to sleep here with me,” he says, while Gon finds a comfortable position for himself—on his side, so that he can still look at Killua and be sure that he hasn’t hallucinated the whole thing. 

“But I want to.” For some reason this makes Killua blush, even if maybe it’s the flashlight’s fault.

It would really be awesome if Gon could do some magic himself, but maybe it would be still pretty awesome if Killua would just like to be his friend, and share some of the fun things that you can do with magic. 

“Say, Killua,” he tries again, when Killua has already closed his eyes. He opens one, blue and bright. 

“Yes?”

“I was thinking… Are your parents wizards too? I mean, since you said that you must be born a wizard I thought…”

Killua groans. 

“I told you, it’s sorcerers… And, yes, they are.”

“The both of them?”

Killua nods, shifting on his side too. He sinks a bit more under his blanket.

“And my siblings too.”

“How many do you have?”

“They’re… is ‘too many’ a number? Because that’s the number, really." He says that in a snort that’s half-amused, half-bitter in a way that Gon really doesn’t get.

“I don’t have any siblings,” he tells Killua then. “And that’s fine, I mean… Sometimes I feel a bit lonely I guess, even if Aunt Mito is awesome. I guess that having a person who’s more like a friend would be cool. Are you friend with your siblings?”

“Some of them, I guess.” Killua’s face crunches up into something difficult to decipher. “I’m really fucking tired. Let’s sleep, okay?”

It’s quite the definitive tone; he raises his hand and snaps at the flashlight. The light turns off instantly. 

Gon giggles, because, _really_. 

“What are you laughing for now?” Killua asks, around a big yawn.

“Nothing, I’m just happy I met you, Killua.”

“What,” he croaks, and rustles under his blanket. “What does that even mean? You’re too weird, really. Now go to sleep, tomorrow I’m going to wake you up super early to search for A… the thing.”

“Sure,” Gon says, and mimics him in settling on the mattress. If he stretched a hand, he could touch him easily—he doesn’t know exactly why, but it’s such an exciting thought. 

Maybe it’s because Killua is a wizard. There’s a wizard inside his tree house. Inside his _bed_. 

This has been the best. Day. Ever.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How do you chapter chapters--  
> Anywho, please accept this chunk of words XD

The alarm clock reads half past earlier than usual and Mito frowns at the dim light seeping through the shutters.

There’s still some kind of vibrant energy around after yesterday’s outburst of storm, something like static. It makes her hair stand up.

“Whatever,” she decides, and gets up with a yawn. It really is early AF, as the youngsters say—she too is still what older people would define a youngster, but that doesn’t exempt her from waking up before everybody else to go make breakfast. 

No lunch, she remembers: Gon has taken a generous amount from the pot full of octopus soup from dinner. 

She puts the kettle on the stove and finds herself studying the fence from the kitchen window. 

“There’s magic in the air, don’t you think?”

Mito startles but doesn’t swear, which reconfirms her as most suited parental figure for Gon, thank you very much.

“Grandma,” she says instead. “Could you please announce yourself, instead of just appearing at my back?”

“It wasn’t intended as an ambush,” Abe says, still climbing down the stairs on her felted slippers. “Would you like to ambush them?”

She looks older with every passing day. Mito tilts an eyebrow.

“Them who?”

“Gon,” Abe says, and takes in her hands to get a couple of cups from the shelf.

Mito would inquire further, but Abe raised her and she’s had a lot of time to get used to her needlessly enigmatic comments.

“Last time I checked, Gon was a single person. And that’s quite lucky, since he’s also such a calamity.”

Abe laughs, double chins wobbling.

“Well, he for sure knows how to attract those… Would you like some chamomile, dear?”

“It’s six in the morning, Grandma. I’ll take some tea.”

“Whatever you like, dear.”

Mito sips at her tea, makes batter for the pancakes, and goes back on the second floor to open the windows. She dresses up for work and then gets inside Gon’s bedroom too, to freshen up the air.

The bed is naked, that boy has taken all the pillows and blanket with him—he should leave them inside the tree house, given that he spends more time there than inside his room. Like Mito didn’t lose her mind trying to furnish it in a way that was as similar as possible to the one he had on the island. 

She’s been there for a solid two minutes, picking up socks and putting schoolbooks on their shelves, when something clicks inside her brain, and she turns to face the tree house framed by the window.

“It’s floating,” she says, squinting at the… floating sheet. It looks like a floating sheet.

She tilts her head, then she shakes it. Of course it’s not. Screw tea, she needs coffee.

*

Aunt Mito climbs the ladder to the tree house, a plate full of pancakes balanced on one hand and syrup in her pocket.

She looks around like she’s expecting to find something compromising. 

Gon has already rolled up the mattress and folded the blankets away. 

“Is something wrong, Aunt Mito?”

“I hope not,” she says, eyebrows stern.

“Why did you bring two forks?” Gon asks, weirded out. She looks definitely distressed. 

“Because your great-grandmother wasn’t making any sense… And, anyway! You always drop things over the side, so I guess it’s simpler this way.”

“Thanks! You always think of everything.”

“Do I.” She really sounds like she’s mumbling to herself. “Well then, can I take the sheets back with me or are you planning to sleep here for the whole summer?”

Gon hasn’t touched the pancakes yet. He isn’t really sure what made Aunt Mito suspicious, but she definitely is. Sniffing around like a hunt dog. Can she smell the magic too?

“Don’t worry about it, Aunt Mito! I’ll bring them back myself if needed, okay?”

“Okay then, don’t forget,” she says. “Eat your pancakes. Wash the plate, go say good morning to grandma and don’t you dare be late to class. I’m off to work.”

“Have a nice day!”

She climbs down the ladder, agile and small. Gon follows her red hair until she’s back on the ground, and waves in her direction. She then hops on her bike, messenger bag secured on the side, and she’s off, cycling down the road, short hair waving in the wind. 

“It’s okay,” Gon says, head back inside. “You can come out now.”

Killua coughs, colors blurring as he turns visible again.

“Well, take your time, it’s not like I was holding my breath!”

Gon can’t really stop giggling. When he opened his eyes and found out that Killua was still there, sleeping right beside him, it was so exciting it sparked some bright energy inside him that he can’t really shake off. He doesn’t want to.

“She would have gotten suspicious! Here, she brought two forks, isn’t she the best?”

Killua’s eyes are already inspecting the pancakes like they’re something of unknown origin. 

“Well, she seems cool.” He takes a bite. “Okay, super cool,” he decides, on behalf of breakfast.

They attack the pile of pancakes on the same plate in a battle of forks and it’s so funny that Gon forgets to actually focus on what he’s eating; Killua ends up getting inside his mouth most of the food, but that’s fine, he really looks like he needs the fuel. Gon is pretty sure he’s the one who’s getting the best out of this whole deal, since he isn’t actually worried about the mysterious object they need to find. 

“I think I’ll have to search a wider area,” Killua is telling him, when the last bit of pancake has finally been demolished. “This is a city, right? Do you have a map?”

Gon lights up. 

“Yes, wait a bit!” He’s actually pretty adept at mapping places. Mister Wing, one of his teachers, brought him a book on cartography when he happened to find him drawing a map of the school when he should have been paying attention to the history lesson. He’s a pretty cool guy, Mister Wing.

He goes back to the house to say hello to Abe and leave the plate inside the sink; he gets back to Killua with a map, a compass, and some tea that Abe made.

“She gave me two cups,” he notices, but Killua is already fully invested in the map.

“You drew this?” he asks.

“Yes, it’s really fun to do. It isn’t exactly completed, because I like to draw only places where I’ve already been, and I don’t have that much time to explore, with school and homework and stuff.”

“It’s pretty awesome.” Killua looks honestly impressed and Gon busies himself with pouting some tea so that he doesn’t have to look too delighted.

“What is it?” he asks, when it’s clear that something is bugging Killua. He frowns even harder.

“It’s just… I don’t want to ruin it.”

“It’s fine, I took the compass and pencils so we could write on it. It’s okay if you have to use it, that’s why maps are fun. It’s like a treasure hunt!”

“Okay. How do you feel about liquids, though? Like, for example, blood?” Killua asks, wary.

“So blood magic is a thing!” Gon says, and he can barely contain his excitement.

Killua rolls his eyes.

“I’ll take that as a freebie,” he says, and he’s already munching at his thumb.

Gon looks closer as he lets one drop of blood fall into the crevices of the folded page. 

Killua clears his throat and spreads one open hand over the map, eyes closed. 

“Look at this,” he says. 

Just like any time before, something happens: Gon can feel it in the air; a shift, like the world flipped and then stopped for a second. Until everything starts moving again, drop of blood running on the paper like a perfect marble, uncertain under Killua’s palm. 

Gon follows it sliding on the ink lines, from his house toward the road and then back, circling the garden and getting back again toward the road.

Killua spies between his own fingers, frown deepening.

“Why isn’t it stopping? It should stop somewhere.”

“It’s just hanging around here,” Gon says.

“But it should stop. Even if we were, like, seated on top of it, the drop should stop, that’s how divination works.”

“Maybe there’s something bothering it?” Gon tries, unsure.

Killua looks honestly puzzled, if not a bit desperate. 

“Maybe. It could be the teapot…”

“Is it a teapot we’re searching for, then?” Gon doesn’t want to pry, he’s just… Everything sounds so exciting, searching for a mysterious teapot with a wizard who knows so many charms and also having a full-blown sleepover with a friend his age.

Killua’s looking at the teapot that stands between them, wary and animal-like. For the first time, Gon gets that maybe he’s more than vague and defiant: he’s just plain scared. But what could be scary enough to worry someone who knows how to do incredible magic like him? Conjuring entire storms with nothing more than a bit of concentration?

“It’s a teapot,” he says then, before Gon could think to withdraw his question.

“And how come it’s not where it’s supposed to be?”

“Because my brother is an ass,” Killua says, and rubs his face with both hands. “Anyway, it’s a teapot, and it should have been the same place I appeared yesterday.”

“I think we should have found a teapot, it’s a pretty odd thing to keep inside a school,” Gon says. “So maybe it really isn’t there.”

Killua nods, arms crossed and a frown on his face. 

“It’s just… The charm I used to come here, you know?” His voice is lower, like he’s sure they’re being spied on, which really doesn’t make any sense. Gon would have known, he’s quite adept at keeping track of people and animals alike; he knows that Abe is down in the front garden watering the plants and around them there are just birds and the neighbor’s cat, snoring lazily on the fence. 

Killua shivers still, even if he’s wearing clothes a bit too hot for the season. 

“That charm, it’s pretty complicated, I had to do a lot of calculation and you have to have a really strong connection to the thing you’re searching for. I mean, I was preparing it for quite some time now, but it required a lot of concentration and a lot of power, so maybe I was more tired than I thought and I hadn’t really eaten for quite sometimes and maybe I didn’t concentrate enough and… I think I screwed up.” He exhales _hard_. It’s painful to watch, Gon can feel him breathing anxiety. “And then, if I did screw up, I don’t know…”

“Can’t you try again?” Gon asks. Killua blinks, raising his chin to look at him instead of his own feet. 

“I… I could try. Now I’ve eaten, and I’m not in that darn place anymore, so I won’t have to pass the wards… Yeah, I think it could work,” he says, more hopeful and with a note of strenght in his voice. “I’ll need a lot of blood, though. And a pen,” he adds. Gon is already handing him a pencil.

“Do you really always need blood to do magic?”

“Not always,” Killua tells him, but he’s pretty distracted, engrossed into scribbling what looks like pretty complicated math on the map. “But sometimes you do and the more blood the more effective the magic.”

“And it must be your own blood? You could use mine too if you want,” says Gon.

The tip of the pencil snaps and the wooden stab screeches on the paper. Killua goggles at him like Gon has sprouted a second head.

“What?”

“People always say that I’m incredibly sturdy. I usually heal super-fast and never get sick so… Did I say something wrong?”

“I’m not going to use your blood, Gon,” Killua says, half-laughing half-shocked. “Who in his right mind would say something like that? Leave this alone, okay? I’m not a frigging’ vampire, I don’t need your blood.”

Gon would really like to ask if that means vampires exist, but Killua is already picking another pencil to go back scribbling, muttering something about how humans are definitely crazy.

Gon sighs, looking at the tree’s shadow on the ground.

“I can’t stay, if I’m late for class Aunt Mito is going to ground me big time,” he explains, getting some books inside his backpack as fast as he can. 

Killua nods, and waves the hand that isn’t busy with the pencil.

“No problem. It’s actually better if there aren’t humans in the vicinity when you do stuff like this, really.”

Gon would seriously pay much more than his blood, maybe an entire organ, to be the human who gets caught up in a magical blood ritual, but he really can’t stay.

“Please, don’t go anywhere even if you do find the teapot, okay? Just… come back to me. Promise!”

Killua blinks, eyes huge and a surprised expression on his face. His shoulders fall down and he’s already nodding, before Gon could be any more demanding.

“Sure. I owe you two meals,” he says and drowns both hands inside his pockets. “Here,” he says, fishing out something shiny and small. “You can have this, so you’ll be sure to find me if you need me.”

Gon takes it. It’s the shiny wrapper of one of the Chocorobots they ate yesterday at school.

He should probably ask, but he buries it inside his pocket instead.

“You’re super weird too, Killua!” he says, but he’s already climbing down the tree-house, so that Killua can’t really do anything more than growling in his general direction. 

He takes his bike, then, and yells another goodbye. Abe answers him, and smiles under her straw hat while she waters the petunias. 

*

It should be illegal, school in the summertime. Math in the summertime. 

“Why do you like math, Knuckle?” Gon asks, so darn confused. His head is definitely somewhere else. Somewhere with Killua. 

Knuckle lifts his eyes from the book and sighs. He lifts one hand to scratch at the back of his head. 

“Well, a great part of my interest comes maybe from the fact that I find it pretty simple to understand. Logical, you know? That’s a good thing. Math makes sense, which is something you don’t find that easily around.”

“It makes sense to you.” Gon knows he’s whining, but he feels way more frustrated today, knowing that he could be doing exciting magical stuff instead of being stuck there, adding up polynomials with each other like they aren’t just a bunch of numbers and letters that apparently are numbers too, and what does that even mean. “To me, it’s like trying to read something backwards.”

Knuckle nods, solemn. 

“That’s why I said that probably I like it because I always found it simple to understand. It’s perfectly fine to not feel like that, you know? Not everyone should like the same things and you have a lot of other talents, you’ll be fine even without that much math in your life… You just need to concentrate on some of this stuff so that you can get your high school diploma without too much drama.”

“I don’t really feel like everything has to always make sense,” Gon says. “I mean, sometimes things make sense to me even if they don’t for someone else.”

Knuckle’s eyebrow tilts under the shadow of his impressive pompadour.

“Are you talking about something specific?” he asks, polynomials forgotten for a bit. It’s a relief, really, because Gon needed a pause so bad—and it’s been only twenty minutes. 

He stretches both arms over his head, looking outside the window. The sun is shining perfectly bright over the backyard, just like it was when Killua appeared yesterday.

“I mean… do you believe in magic, Knuckle?”

“Magic, you say.” He sounds pretty incredulous, but he doesn’t laugh. That’s another thing Gon loves about Knuckle: he always takes him seriously, when he tries to talk about how dreadful math is to him and when he derails their conversation onto beetles and whatever other animal specimen is his most recent obsession. When they talk about dogs, he shows his true colors and outright cries just because fluffy Pomeranians exist in this universe.

“Well, it depends on what do you think magic is, I guess? I mean, to me it’s just something science couldn’t yet explain.”

Knuckle says that, and Gon is looking at him, only his face gets black and white for a second—no, sepia tones. Again. 

Then Knuckle falls, under the weight of something falling even faster from somewhere else; something that smells of ozone and light, and swears right before the impact. 

Gon has managed to jump out of his desk; he walks around it to get a closer look to the broken chair and poor Knuckle.

“Crap,” Killua says, with disheveled hair and an elbow pressed inside Knuckle’s stomach. “I think I screwed up again.”

He stands up, while Gon is still trying to make sure that Knuckle is in fact alive. 

“You did it? The charm?”

“And I ended up here again!” Killua says, frustration spilling out just like the blood smeared on his arms. “So it must be here, you see? I just have to… I’m going to search again.”

Gon nods, one hand searching for Knuckle’s pulse instead.

“I think I’ll have to take care of him before coming with you, though,” he starts, but Killua has already lifted one hand. 

“It’s fine, I’ll search by myself. You just do your… Whatever it is you’re doing,” he adds, one eyebrow raised at the scattered books on the desk. “I’ll let you know if I find something.”

Gon pouts a bit, but Knuckle is already groaning, eyes fluttering. Killua vanishes, blending into his surroundings just right before Knuckle opens his eyelids, exhaling hard. 

“What happened,” he asks, still seated on the floor and sorely confused. 

“You chair broke,” Gon says. “It was pretty sudden. Are you feeling alright?”

Knuckle blinks and looks at him like he isn’t sure what language he’s using. 

“Didn’t a bloody fairy with white hair appear from thin air to crush me?”

Gon has to use all his self-restraint not to laugh, and he really hopes that Killua is already down the hall, because he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t like to be called fairy _at all_. 

*

Not a great day for Gon’s math progresses and not a great day for Killua too, apparently.

“Drink up.”

Killua looks at the giant pitcher with open mistrust.

“What in the ever loving heck is this thing?” he asks, eyeing the not so inviting greenish color inside the glass. Gon would be worried about explaining the blood stains on the floor if he wasn’t way more worried for Killua _on_ the floor of his tree house. He just collapsed there as fast as they came back from school and hasn’t moved since.

“It’s a smoothie. I promise it’s good, there’s bananas and spinach and—”

“You put spinach and bananas in the same container and decided that blending them was a good idea?”

“It is!” Gon says, and rolls his eyes before taking a sip and promptly removing his new green mustache with a finger. Maybe he should have brought a straw. “See? It’s good!”

“It’s green,” Killua rebuts, squinting at him with open mistrust. It’s a bit like taming a feral cat—Gon is quite the expert, actually.

He sighs and makes a scene of drawing out a shiny package from his pocket.

“If you drink a bit of green stuff now, you can have a bit of chocolate later, how about that?”

Killua’s springs on his elbows. He’s still pale as a sheet but his eyes look way more lively.

“Are you bribing me?”

“I’ve known you for two days and you were bleeding for the most of them,” Gon says. “I really think you should stay hydrated, that’s all.”

Killua scoffs.

“Give me water, then! If I had one single drop of magic left in me I would have already snatched that chocolate, you know that, right?”

“And yet,” Gon says, handing him the smoothie.

Killua sighs, and sits up to accept it like a death sentence. He sniffs at it like he’s expecting a swamp creature to come out and choke him, but he chugs it down nonetheless.

“Is blood that important?” Gon asks. “I was serious, you know? You can really use mine.”

Killua chokes on the smoothie, but when Gon tries to pat him on the back he dodges, eyes blazing with anger.

“I won’t use your fucking blood, Gon!” he yelps, between coughs. The pitcher gets back on the floor, half emptied. “Blood is a catalyst, it enhances magic. But it’s fucked up, okay? Using people’s blood to do magic, it’s fucked up and I don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore, so—”

“Okay,” Gon says, and Killua snaps out from that dark spiral of thoughts like Gon had suddenly switched the light on. “Sorry, I didn’t know. I just wanted to be useful, but you’re the one who knows what he’s doing so we’ll do as you say.” The package crinkles when he opens the snack. Even without magic, Killua manages to make it disappear half the chocolate bar in one bite.

Gon’s eyes shift from the smudge of chocolate on his cheek to the patches of magically mended skin on Killua’s arm, where scars old and new overlap in abstract angry shapes.

“You know, I don’t like it. If using people’s blood to do magic is bad, that’s true for you too, you know?” Gon says; he can feel the frown bending his eyebrows. “You’re people too.”

Killua blinks at the chocolate and then at him. Twice.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he says, half-laughing. “It’s my blood, I can do what I want with it.”

“Well, you shouldn’t!” Gon argues. “You said that using blood is bad, so—”

“I didn’t say that. I just said that I won’t use the blood of anybody else, that’s all. What do you even know, you’re human—”

“But you’re willing to use yours, how is that better?”

Killua’s eyes widen; he scoffs.

“It’s plenty better. It’s self-evidently better, what’s wrong with you?”

Gon opens his mouth—and then closes it, unhappy.

“It’s just… I don’t like for you to get hurt.” He tells it to his crossed arms and just as he knows that is the truth, he really doesn’t know how to make it sound as important as he feels it is.

Unsurprisingly, Killua answers with a snort.

“Well, too bad.” He frowns, looking at the bitten snack. “And you make it sound worse than it is. I really prefer it this way.”

Gon’s brain tries to wrap around the implications—but then Killua is handing him half a chocolate-bar and Gon’s protest dies on his tongue. It’s a peace offering.

“You should finish your smoothie,” Gon says instead and Killua’s face looks so utterly disgusted he starts laughing.

They try to make each other drink the smoothie and end up thrashing about until the pitcher falls from the tree.

When Aunt Mito’s voice calls from downstairs, Killua is already vanished, holding his breath in a startled hiss.

Gon crawls toward the ladder, to look down.

“Welcome back,” he says, even if she’s frowning already, empty pitcher at her feet. Or maybe she’s just tired, bike tilted on her side and bags heavy on the tail box.

“Come down and help me with the groceries.”

It’s an order. Gon smiles at the empty tree house.

“I’m going to search for your teapot. Maybe it’s somewhere inside the house, okay?”

A flying, disembodied hand gives him a thumb up and Gon grins.

Mito is waiting with a face that promises grounding.

“So, what was it that made you laugh so much?” she asks, as Gon picks up the heaviest bag and a bottle of detergent.

“Sometimes homework is fun?”

“You’re an awful liar,” Mito says, but she ruffles his hair and goes park the bike without asking any more questions.

She does ask questions when Gon dares to ask his.

“A teapot?”

“Yes,” he says, while helping put tomatoes and salad away in the fridge. “An old teapot, maybe something we took with us from Whale Island?”

Mito’s eyebrows are tilted; she squints at the cupboard, lips clipped.

“We have just the one teapot, you know which one. Grandma’s favorite. We didn’t bring that much stuff, you know that.”

“Not even some, like, special stuff? Like the stuff Ging sends sometimes?”

Gon is walking on a landmine, there. Mito’s eyes look like glass as she blinks at him, a box of eggs in her hands.

“You know perfectly well we left all that garbage behind, Gon.” She opens the fridge so forcefully that the bottles clink on each other. “Why are you suddenly interested, anyway.”

“Just because,” he says, not too fast. “It’s for school?”

Mito’s eyebrows flatten in skepticism and Gon starts to sweat—he is an awful liar to begin with and one just doesn’t lie to Aunt Mito, ever.

She’s already rolling her eyes, one hand on her hip.

“I can’t help you if you don’t ask for help, Gon.”

He looks at her and she looks at him and they stare at each other for an entire, long minute until Abe comes shuffling about in her slippers. She opens the bag with the apricots and starts munching on one without washing it first.

“If we’re waiting to decide who’s the most stubborn between you two, I might as well start cooking dinner myself,” she says.

“Fine, whatever! Do as you please… Grandma, Gon wants to know if Ging sent us some kind of magical teapot, am I right?”

“Well, Ging hasn’t send us anything in a long time, since this girl used to try and get rid of everything.” Abe’s voice is always sweet, even if Aunt Mito looks ready to burst. “I had to pick up that box from the garbage at least a dozen times, do you remember Mito?”

The eggs crack. Gon looks at the rivulet of white and yolk dripping steadily inside the box, and on Mito’s wrist.

“Yes grandma, I do remember,” she hisses. The eggs get shoved on the kitchen sink as she grabs a mop. Gon exchanges a look with Abe; she’s smiling.

When she turns around, Mito’s scowl is back in place, but she also looks way less belligerent.

“If you’re searching for something Ging-related, God knows why, you should probably ask Mister Satotz, since apparently Ging talks to him way more than with his own family.”

Right—oh, sure, _right_. How didn’t he think of it before?

Killua said that Gon must be the one related to the thing, since his tracing charms and teleportation spells—are these the right words? Gon isn’t sure—always bring him back to him somehow, but Mister Satotz is a good bet, and it can’t hurt to try, right?

“Thanks aunt Mito, I’ll ask him,” Gon says then, and feels again the sparkle of something exciting coming. He’s being useful, Killua will be happy.

He knows that both Mito and Abe are looking at him funny, but he really can’t stop grinning.

*

Mister Satotz is one of the coolest guys Gon knows. Kite is definitely the coolest and Razor could probably win second place, but Mister Satotz is pretty close.

“He has this big antiquaries shop, it’s huge! I mean, the shop itself is pretty small, but he also has this big storage room and he works for the museum… He’s an archeologist, so he knows lots of stuff about… well, about pretty much everything!”

Killua still looks really skeptical. He was really skeptical about the bike too and he kind of squeezed Gon’s lungs out of his ribcage when he rode a bit too fast across an entire roundabout to avoid traffic. But when they went down a whole staircase he made them land safely on the ground with magic, which was awesome and definitely worth the scare.

“You’re crazy,” he’s still saying, even if he too laughed at least a bit. “You really are. The craziest human I’ve ever met.”

“You’re the only wizard I know so I don’t really know if you’re crazy or not,” Gon says, and he’s already stepping inside Satotz’s shop, one hand pressed onto the doorknob.

“Wait, I should at least disguise myself…”

“Hello, Gon!” Satotz is giving them his back, standing tall on top of a taller metal ladder to reach the top shelf. The place is overflowing with old books and older furniture.

Gon answer with just as much enthusiasm while Killua stays there, mouth agape and eyes big.

Satotz turns around and studies them both really hard.

“Well, well. It’s a pleasure, a real pleasure… I’m afraid your father didn’t send anything new for me to look at, Gon. I’m waiting for something to arrive later this week, though.”

“That’s okay mister Satotz. We were actually searching for something else, since it should be pretty special I thought that maybe Ging brought it here?”

“Something else?” Satotz climbs down the ladder, and he looks even taller with both his feet on the ground. “What kind of else are we talking about?”

“It’s…”

“A teapot,” Killua starts, looking wary but still sure of himself as he gesticulates an explanation. “It’s like this big. It’s red with these yellow dots...”

“A teapot,” Satotz repeats, and he’s already scanning the whole place as if he had a corner dedicated only to teapots. Maybe he does: Gon has seen lots of odd stuff inside that shop.

“I really think it may be inside Ging’s stuff,” Gon tells him. “Because it’s supposed to be… You know, special.”

Satotz looks him in the eyes and then raises an eyebrow to look at Killua too.

“Understood. Is it dangerous, though? Because you know your father doesn’t want for you to tinker with dangerous artifacts.”

“It’s not really dangerous,” Killua interjects, fast. “It’s just… It needs to be handled with care. And once I get it, it will become completely innocuous.”

“And you would be?” Satotz asks, sizing him up.

Gon’s feet move before he even thinks about moving. He steps further between Killua and Satotz, smiling.

“This is Killua, he’s a friend! Right, Killua?” he asks, and for some reason Killua is looking at him like he said something weird, pale face turned pink.

“I… Yeah. We’re friends, I guess.”

Gon beams. Of course they are, they had two whole sleep-overs at this point.

“Anyway, Mister Satotz, can we go look inside Ging’s vault? We won’t touch anything dangerous, I promise.”

“I trust you,” Satotz says and it would have been a bit warmer if he wasn’t still studying Killua with one eyebrow raised.

Killua follows along with much more worry than hope on his face, so Gon decides that it’s okay to grab his hand and maybe make him cooperate a bit more. He looks dumbstruck then, but it’s still way better than worried.

The vault isn’t exactly a vault—more like a room with a big, sturdy door. Gon has always been welcomed inside as long as he doesn’t take anything out and as far as Aunt Mito doesn’t hear a word about it.

“I usually just come here to have a look, make some drawings,” he tells Killua, while Satotz opens the first, the second, the third lock with his set of keys. “Some of these things smell incredibly, kinda like you.”

“I do _what_ now?” Killua says, choking, but it ends up covered by the squeaking sound of the hinges. Satotz opens the door like it isn’t thicker than his whole body.

“Here,” he says, as that unique smell of antiques, dust and magic prickles at Gon’s nose. He takes it all in with the familiar sight of boxes and locks, drawers and shelves standing tall in the middle, to close and open up spaces as if they were building a labyrinth.

“Just remember to put everything back in its place. We wouldn’t want for important objects to get mixed up, right?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be super scrupulous! Right Killua?”

Killua is intent on gaping still, ready to bolt, so Gon takes the matter in his hand—literally, he waves one at Satotz and uses the other to drag Killua inside the room, Satotz’s tall form disappearing behind the first corner. They look at each other, old dusty artifacts looming from above.

“Well, let’s start searching then!”

Killua is still looking at him weird, but it’s a good kind of weird: like he’s surprised—maybe impressed is the appropriate word.

Gon is honestly pleased; a wizard like Killua, who’s super cool, looking at him like Gon knows something that he doesn’t.

“Is this going to be okay?” Killua asks, when the door has closed shut behind them, with the last syllable of Satotz telling them he has some accountant stuff to make sense of. “I mean, do you trust that guy? He didn’t even ask why we are searching for a teapot out of all things. He just…”

“It isn’t the first time I come here searching for weird stuff,” Gon says, and heads straight toward the shelf that’s signed with a T. Most of the time stuff is catalogued in a pretty random way, as far as he knows, but starting from teapots is as good as any other plan. “Mister Satotz is one of my father’s friends from work,” he explains, while Killua shakes what looks to be a very old typewriter. He puts it down and jumps on a chair to get a better view of the shelf. There’s a big box way up that declares to be fragile.

“He’s a pretty weird guy,” Killua says, but he doesn’t stop searching. “Are there even teapots here?”

“I think this is a sugar bowl.” Gon tosses it at Killua with a perfectly calibrated parabolic throw. “So maybe we’ll find teapots too.”

“I don’t know, it really looks like we’re going in blindfolded here.”

“Well, your spells didn’t work—” Killua looks at him like he could behead him with one glance and Gon grimaces. “I mean, it’s true! And you said that I must be connected to it somehow, right? My only connection with magical stuff is through Ging and my only connection to Ging is this place, really.”

Killua weights the sugar bowls between his hands, pensive.

“So he comes back here sometimes?”

“He mostly sends other people, usually Kite… Oh, you’ll love Kite,” Gon adds, in sudden inspiration. “He’s the coolest guy in the world and I’m sure he would know how to find your teapot—”

“No way, hold your horses,” Killua says, menacing. He jumps down, index finger pointing at Gon’s forehead like a gun. “You ended up getting involved because you’re stubborn as hell, but that’s it, okay? I don’t want anybody else to meddle with this thing.”

“But Kite—”

“No buts,” Killua says and Gon’s pupils cross as he tries to follow Killua’s finger pressed in between his eyes, so hard that he has to take a step back. “The fewer people know about the teapot, the better it is. Bad stuff happens when humans try to use it. Really bad stuff, deadly stuff.” His voice is serious and quite a bit ominous.

Maybe Gon really is weird: instead of being scared, he feels his interest spike up.

“Deadly?”

“Deadly,” Killua repeats. He hits him on the forehead, not hard enough to hurt, but Gon still makes a point of rubbing at the spot.

“Okay, just… Kite is super trustworthy. I wouldn’t have proposed it otherwise,” he insists. “So… if we ever need help, he would be the person to go to.”

Killua sighs, hands crossed.

“We won’t need it. You’re positive we’re going to find it here, right? Then let’s fucking get to work!”

*

The teapot isn’t there. They searched for almost five hours, from the most recent of Mister Satotz’s acquisitions to the oldest, dustiest items. Killua is still sitting on the stepladder he enchanted to get a look on the top shelves, while Gon stays down, one finger in his ear as he tries to reacquire his hearing after he had the awful idea of trying to hear the sea inside a gigantic, spiky shell. It screamed so loud that Killua too yelled—and then fell, carrying with him the giant box he was inspecting. They spent half an hour retrieving heavy, scattered marbles that looked like small planets. Gon is almost sure he heard the sound of volcanic eruptions and thunders from the bluish one, but it might have been tinnitus from his previous encounter with the screaming shell.

Anyway, fact is, the teapot isn’t there and Killua is looking progressively more stressed out about finding it.

Gon still hasn’t asked what’s inside.

“If it passed under my nose, it may be at the museum,” Satotz explains, when it’s almost dinnertime and the weather is menacing another untimely downpour. Gon is pretty sure it must be somehow Killua-related, because his furrowed brows just _promise_ storm.

“It’s just a pot. It doesn’t even look that old,” Killua tells him. “It’s been in my family for ten years at most and it wouldn’t be of any interest for a museum.”

“But it’s special, otherwise you two wouldn’t be here searching for it,” Satotz says. “And such special objects attract special people. And other special objects as well… Before I forget, Gon,” he adds, and he’s already picking up an old bronze key. He opens one of the drawers behind his desk, Gon and Killua stretching to peek from above.

“Here,” Satotz says, retrieving an anonymous box. “This one is an interesting thing your father sent me some years ago. I think you’ll find it useful, just remember to bring it back one of these days.”

“What is it?” Killua asks, while Gon is already opening the box. “It’s pretty ugly.”

It is, as far as necklaces go. Gon isn’t exactly an expert, really, but the chain is just too big and the pendant looks like a medieval shield of some kind, spiky and definitely heavy.

“Wait, don’t—” Killua starts, but Gon has already put it around his neck. Right, heavy.

“Thanks mister Satotz! I promise I won’t break it.”

Satotz nods, but it’s difficult to decide if he’s smiling under that curly mustache.

They get out of the shop, bell chiming as the door closes itself at their backs, right before Gon’s ear gets scrunched up.

“What were you thinking, you dumbass!” Killua’s yells, right in his eardrum and still pulling at his lobe. “You never put potentially cursed object around your damn neck, it’s basically like asking to get hexed!”

“Don’t yell at me,” Gon says, and steps on the sidewalk, arms swinging. “Wait, you think it’s magical too? It does smell like magic,” Gon tells him, pulling at the necklace to inspect it more closely.

Killua looks on the verge of developing some pretty serious facial twitch. He breathes through his nostrils and presses his fingers at the bridge of his nose.

“Well, a lot of stuff in that shop gave off quite the magical vibe,” he says, voice lower. “And that thing definitely does too.”

“What do you think it does?” Gon asks, excited. “Maybe it’s like Paladin Necklace in Greed Island… It also looks a bit like it, I think.”

“What?”

“Greed Island,” Gon says, and blinks. “Killua, we have to play Greed Island!”

“We don’t have to—what are you even talking about?”

“You’ll see, it’s awesome! I swear you’re going to love it… Come on now, I have to get back home at least in time for dinner, or aunt Mito will really get pissed!” He leaps on the bike, gesturing for Killua to climb behind him. “Tonight we can have a look at Paladin Necklace and see if you could use it to find your teapot!”

“That makes even less sense,” Killua says, but he gets on the bike and grips hard around him when Gon starts pedaling, wind whistling loud in their ears.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A friend of mine used to crush me with his overpowered elf deck and it shows XD

True to its name, Paladin Necklace is a necklace. And doesn’t seem to do anything else than weigh around Gon’s neck.

Killua has asked it what it could do, with an extremely intense gaze and a commanding tone, but the necklace wouldn’t budge. Gon suspect that’s because it’s, in fact, a necklace, but Killua took it as a personal offense. 

Today's plan is to try a summoning charm, calling the teapot to them instead of the other way around.

It does involve blood once again and Gon is starting to fear that Killua is going to be drained by the end of the week.

“Stop with the face,” Killua tells him, as he drives the knife on his skin for the umpteenth time without even making a face. “It bleeds quite a lot, but the back of the forearm is actually one of the safest places, since there aren’t any major blood vessels there.”

The blood drips fast on the bottom of the pitcher Gon used to bring smoothies—Aunt Mito asked him how come he has developed such a liking for spinach and bananas all of the sudden, but she didn’t comment further.

“Do you really need that much?”

Killua’s brow furrow as he sizes up Gon’s face.

“Better safe than sorry. And it isn’t even remotely the amount I needed to come here in the first place. At home we have these incredibly powerful wards, you know, so that was pretty difficult.”

Gon nods, hypnotized by the blood; it gathers in red bubbles at the end of the cut before falling down.

“Shouldn’t wards prevent people from coming in? Why do they work for the ones who are already inside?”

Killua’s eyes go blank all of a sudden; Gon’s body moves on its own to place a hand on his shoulder. But Killua isn’t going to pass out: he’s shocked. “Well. It’s just. You know. Usually, I should ask permission to get out.”

“So you ran away from home?” It’s something Gon was already thinking about, but he must have been the only one because the look on Killua’s face is one of pure amazement.

“I think I did,” he says, voice uncertain until a laugh comes out, brief and nervous. “Hell, I think I did run away from home… I was so concentrated on the teapot I didn’t really think about the implications, I guess.” He blinks at his own blood still dripping down in a steady flow and then—he smiles, with a worrying mix of disbelief and exhilaration. “They’re going to be _so_ mad. They probably already are.”

“I’ll punch them,” Gon says, serene. “I don’t think I like your family.”

Killua goggles at him and _laughs_. 

“They can be a hindrance." He shakes his head, still smiling, and presses one hand on the cut. When he lifts it, there’s nothing more than a rough patch of smooth pink-ish skin, almost like a burn, to be added to the other ones.

Gon frowns.

“I’m really sorry we couldn’t find it. The teapot, I mean. I really was sure it would have been among Ging's stuff.”

Killua lifts the pitcher to look critically at the blood, smell of iron dense and strong under Gon’s nostrils. 

“Your dad must be quite the character, how come he’s not around?”

“He’s never been around,” Gon says. Maybe it’s a bit weird, chatting amiably about Ging while they’re in the thick of planning a magical blood ritual—maybe it’s not, since it’s Ging they’re talking about. “Aunt Mito said he left me on the island and he never came back since. He’s an archeologist, you’ve seen all the cool stuff he collects.”

Sometimes it’s difficult, explaining Ging Freecs and, anyway, Gon never really had the chance because usually people know Ging before they know him. It’s just how it is.

“Wait, so… You never met him?”

Gon shrugs.

“I’ve seen a couple photos and sometimes Kite tells me about him. They went on some crazy adventures together!”

Killua is frowning. He doesn’t ask anything more, though, and just stands up carrying the pitcher with him.

“Come on, or the blood is going to clot… Are you really sure you don’t mind getting involved?”

Don’t mind doesn’t even start to cover it. Gon is thrilled. He tries to act at least a bit cool, because Killua is sizing him up.

“I’m sure, Killua.”

“Okay then. You lead the way,” Killua says; his face is still pale white, but his eyes are resolute.

* 

Gon knows pretty much every secluded spot in the area. The old yard behind the school is empty in this period, even smokers prefer other spots. He takes his time chaining the bike to the fence, while Killua is already sprinting up, leaping over it like there’s wind under the soles of his shoes. Gon looks at him in awe before he climbs too, less graceful but still effective. He lands on the other side, legs bent, and pats the dust away from his knees.

Killua is already walking in a circle, pouring blood in mysterious patterns on the dusty tufts of grass.

“So, what should I do?” Gon asks, feeling the enthusiasm grow. 

Killua peers inside his eyes like he’s searching for hints of uncertainty. He sighs then and hands him the bloody pitcher.

“This is disgusting and weird on many levels. You can still bail out if you want.”

“Do I have to drink it?” Gon asks, looking at the remaining blood inside the glass, glinting dark and dense under the sun.

Killua sputters.

“Hell, no! Ew, that’s _really_ disgusting, why would you say that!”

“Oh, okay, then I’m good I think,” Gon says.

Killua presses a palm on his face; he looks exhausted.

“You don’t have to drink it, you just… Sit down there and hold it, okay? I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Okay!” Gon says and finds the spot right in the middle of Killua’s weird design. It’s a pentacle. Gon would really like to write this inside his dull summer report.

The smell of iron is stifling, but Gon doesn’t move from his spot. He waits when Killua tells him to; he waits when he closes his eyes and when he closes his fists and when the air trembles with static.

Gon’s air prickles on his neck; he can feel the goosebumps growing on his skin. It should be scary—it’s exhilarating instead, like being dipped in energy—a good kind of energy, Killua’s energy, as the blood smeared around them starts to gleam quietly. It isn’t flashy; magic with Killua looks like a silent thing, threaded with focus and sheer willpower and Gon is so captivated by it that he doesn’t realize it’s started raining until the drops are already as big as pebbles, and falling down hard in a thunderous uproar.

Gon looks from the ground up, rain scattered in vertical rivers under a gathering of clouds as dense as molten lead.

“Killua,” he tries, but the wind is screaming inside his ears. He has to squint to see him, still standing there in front of him, eyes closed. “Killua, it’s not working.”

He opens his eyes, hair plastered on his forehead.

“I don’t understand,” he says, and maybe it’s the wind, but there’s a crack in his voice. “You must be the one who’s connected to it, otherwise none of this makes sense. It should be working.”

Gon lowers his head to look at the pitcher in his hands; the blood is being diluted with rain, pale reddish water already overflowing. The pentacle too has been washed away—at least, they won’t have to explain that to Mister Tonpa.

“What am I doing wrong?” Killua says then, and he finally sounds broken.

Gon stands up, he empties the pitcher on the ground, right before his shoes—they’re wet already, like the rest of him.

“Maybe you’re just tired,” he tries then, voice loud over the wind. Tired and upset: Killua isn’t crying, but he sure knows how to make the whole sky howl in sympathy.

Gon walks, pitcher forgotten, and place a hand on Killua’s shoulder. The gesture seems to snap him back from whatever place his mind was trapped.

“Let’s go somewhere dry… There’s a place I want you to see, I promise you’ll like it!”

Killua’s eyes are still dull, brow scrunched, but when Gon offers him a hand, he lets himself be led, well secured on the back of the bike. 

Gon rides towards the city center, down the hill and passing the supermarket. The rain is falling down so heavy and dense it’s like it’s coming from every side. When he finally stops in front of Razor’s place, there’s not an inch of dry clothes on their bodies.

Killua gets off the bike, stumbling a bit, but he lets Gon drag him inside, where the familiar bouncing of the air hockey and the jingling of the pinball machine are just as solid as the arcade cabinets standing tall on the sides. The smell of popcorn and chips is overbearing, but maybe just for Gon’s nose.

Killua stands there in the middle, eyes wide and water dripping from his hair.

“What is this place?” 

Gon shakes his head to sprinkle him; he grins at his baffled expression—way better than tired and upset.

“It’s Razor’s place, isn’t it awesome? Come, we need to dry ourselves. Then we can play!”

Killua doesn’t move; he blinks at him, like the concept of playing is somewhat foreign. Gon grabs his hand and drags him down the corridor, shoes squeaking on the floor.

Razor is in the backroom, half sprawled on the floor and busy tinkering with one of the oldest machines.

“Ehi Gon,” he says, smiling and frowning simultaneously. That’s just his face, really, and Gon was bewildered by it at first, but Razor is such a cool guy that he doesn’t really mind spending time trying to decipher his expressions.

Killua’s own are way easier; right now there’s absolute disconcert pictured on his face.

“This is Razor, he’s the owner. Razor, this is Killua. The rain caught us,” he says, even if it’s pretty obvious from the trail of water they left behind. “Sorry,” he adds, on behalf of that. 

Razor doesn’t seem even slightly bothered by it, or at least he doesn’t show it on his face.

“No worries. Today has been awfully slow. Play something, on the house. And go get yourself some towels,” he adds, with a slight frown.

“He’s huge,” it’s the first thing Killua tells him when Gon is back with a handful of Space Invaders towels coming directly from Razor’s private bathroom. 

“He’s a weird guy, but he’s really fun to play with. I come here sometimes after school, because there aren’t that many places to go in the winter, you know?” Gon hands him one of the towels; Killua accepts it but doesn’t look sure of what he should do with it. 

When Gon starts scrubbing his own head, he laughs.

“Wait.” He throws a glance at the back of the room; Razor has literally vanished behind the console, head buried in a bundle of cables and chips. 

Killua blows and the air responds to the touch of his hand; a light, warm wind raises up and Gon feels way less soaked within a minute. 

“Awesome,” he says, raptured. “You’re awesome, Killua.”

Killua goggles at him like he said something incredibly silly. His head is still pretty wet when he shakes it, so Gon puts the towel onto it anyway.

“Jeez, you’re such a mother hen,” Killua says, but he doesn’t fight shy of his grasp.

“There’s a brand new combat game,” Razor says, suddenly popping out from the machines with a couple of cokes in hand. Killua grabs them on instinct, even if he can’t seem to stop looking at Razor like he’s some kind of giant. Gon grins.

“Thanks Razor! But I think Killua never played Greed Island before, so…”

“Sure, I should have known. All the tech in here and you choose the only card game.” Razor shrugs like that’s a silly quirk but funny enough that he doesn’t really care.

Gon knows that he can be a bit single-minded sometimes. Most of the time, if he has to be honest.

“So you get to cast spells, you see?” he’s explaining a couple minutes later. Killua is sitting down cross-legged on the floor right in front ho him; he picks up one of the cards and squints.

“These are not spells. They’re just cards.”

It’s like trying to explain it to Aunt Mito, really. Abe has always been a quicker study, but Gon had high hopes from Killua—he’s an actual magical person, this should be all daily routine for him.

Instead, Killua turns the card upside down and squints harder.

Well, Gon is stubborn. 

“They are cards, of course, because it’s a game,” he says, patient. “But they’re also spells, and magical creatures and talismans and artifacts, see? This is Paladin Necklace—” He picks the card up, to look at the illustration. This one is by Wdune, the scribbly sign flows beside the chain of the necklace. The picture is definitely prettier than the crude, metal pendant Satotz gave him, but the resemblance is still pretty stunning.

Killua is studying Clairvoyance, skeptical look in place.

“I don’t get it.”

Gon nods; he shuffles Paladin Necklace back in his deck.

“Well, it’s really simple. You see, you’re a wizard—”

“I’m a sorcerer,” Killua rebuts, hissing like a cat. “I told you, like, a couple thousand times at this point. It’s not the same thing, I’m…”

“I mean in the game! In Greed Island you get to be a wizard! And the deck of cards is your grimoire, because it contains…”

“I know what a grimoire is, thank you very much.”

“Exactly,” Gon says. “So, do you want to try it out? I swear it’s super fun!”

Killua’s eyes bounce from his cards to Gon’s face and he must see something in that specifically, because he sighs then, and takes his deck to shuffle it. 

“Well, then. I guess a match won’t hurt.”

Gon grins.

*

“No, wait, wait… What if I, ah,” Killua says, pupils bouncing around the floor. “I’ll block you with the dragon and then play…”

“You can’t play anything with all your lands tapped, Killua.” Gon giggles. At round number three, beating Killua is still way too easy. 

“Why can’t I de-tap them, then!”

“It’s untap them, and that’s the rule! It’s still my turn, you know.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Killua insists, and literally taps with his index finger onto one of his lands. “They’re lands, you told me so. You can’t tap land. They’re just there, you can’t tap or de-tap…”

“Un-tap.”

“ _That_ ,” Killua says, irritation barely contained. He growls, re-reads all cards on his hand and growls again. “This _sucks_.”

“You just don’t know how to lose,” Gon tells him, grinning. “Rematch?”

Killua punishes him with an icy glare, but he’s the first one to start collecting the cards from the ground. 

“This time I’ll beat you to a pulp. Just watch.”

Gon watches, and nods, and cuts Killua’s life points in half within the span of the next three minutes.

“But it was my turn!” 

“But this is an instant, you can cast it whenever you want.”

“But when I tried to hex you told me I couldn’t!”

“Because that was a sorcery. Those must be cast during your turn!”

“That’s not how it goes,” Killua says, frowning with the card still gingerly kept between his fingers “If someone wants to curse you, he’s not going to wait for your turn, you know? He’s just going to do it.”

Gon looks at his own cards, creatures displayed on the ground before his bent knees.

“I guess. Did you ever fight with magic? I mean, like a duel?”

Killua tilts his head.

“Like what, dumb humans walking back to back for ten steps to shoot at each other?”

“No, I mean, a magical duel… Okay, yeah, maybe like that.”

Killua shakes his head hard and laughs.

“Of course not, that’s just dumb. You don’t wait for your target to walk away for ten steps or for any steps whatsoever, actually.”

“What’s a target?” 

Killua blinks, startled. He frowns and looks at the cards like they’re something alien and odd that materialized between his fingers.

“Well, just… You know, I mean. Nothing in particular. Just, you cast a spell, there’s a target. Here,” he says, showing him a spell card. “This is an instant, right?”

“Yeah, exactly!” Gon says, way too happy for someone whose attack has been blocked by an enhanced creature. “See? You’re getting the hang of it!”

Killua’s shoulders relax a bit. He nods.

“Guess I am. It’s not that bad, I think.”

He is not that bad, actually: two more rounds and the matches are starting to get way longer and more difficult for Gon to keep up; when Killua wins for the first time, he’s so happy he teases Gon non-stop until he gets crushed in the next rematch.

“I can’t believe it’s gotten so late,” Gon says, when Razor comes to ask them to take a bit less space for their game than the entire floor, since other players need it too. “Aunt Mito is going to kill me, I didn’t even look at my homework.”

“But you went to school this morning,” Killua says and he looks seriously conflicted at the idea of interrupting the game. He gingerly helps him gather the cards.

“Yeah, but that’s for math. I still have all the other homework to take care of… Wizards don’t go to school, right?” Gon asks.

“It’s sorcerer,” Killua says, but he doesn’t even try to put any annoyance in his tone at this point. “And I don’t know every single sorcerer in the world, you know?”

“Yeah, but I don’t care about them. I wanted to know about you,” Gon tells him and wins a puzzled look. “Bye Razor, thanks for having us!”

He peeks out of the door, taking his time to assess them both.

“You’re always welcome. Say hi to your father if you happen to hear from him… You can always come here if you need,” he adds. His unreadable expression is directed toward Killua. 

Killua doesn’t move, hands dig in his pockets, but he too nods when Gon raises his hand again before they’re out on the sidewalk.

“He’s weird,” Killua says. “He looks dangerous.”

Gon shrugs; the chain of his bike is still wet and slippery under his fingers.

“He probably is. I mean, he is an ex-convict… My dad has a lot of awesome acquaintances he got to know while traveling around the world.”

“An ex-convict,” Killua repeats. “And what did he do?”

“I don’t really know. Maybe he killed somebody… Well, he’s out of jail and living honestly now. So it’s fine.” Gon turns to check if there’s something weird behind his back, because Killua is looking at him like he’s sprouted a second head—up until he laughs, and it’s not exactly a good laugh. It bends him in half and when he manages to get back straight his eyes are still huge, fixed on Gon.

“You’re so weird—so it’s fine if one used to kill people if they don’t kill anymore?”

The bike is all wet too; Gon tries to dry the seat with one sleeve.

“I don’t know, I guess it depends on the person, don’t you think? Razor doesn’t hurt anybody, and I like him!”

Killua’s face scrunches up. It’s like he’s trying to squint and widen his eyes simultaneously. He blinks at the sidewalk, one hand to scratch at his temple.

“So would it be fine to you if I said I used to kill people too?”

Gon’s hand stops on the seat. It’s reasonably dry now; no embarrassing wet spot on the back of his shorts in his future. He lifts his head and smiles.

“Well, you said you need lots of blood to do magic, so I thought you might have done something like that. But I don’t think you like it either.” He isn’t sure when exactly he came to that consideration. It just made sense—he’s pretty sure he doesn’t like Killua’s family one bit, with their blood magic and their wards to keep people in without their consent.

He frees the bike from the rack and hops on. Killua is still standing there, mouth agape, wind battering his hair in every direction.

“I hate it,” he says, and swallows so hard his eyes glint. “I really, really hate it and I don’t want to do it ever again.”

Really, Gon hates Killua’s family. 

“Then we’ll make sure you’ll never have to do it again. Come on, I asked Aunt Mito to make fried anchovies tonight, you’ll love them!”

Killua looks at him like he’s made of actual living, swarming anchovies.

“You’re not just weird, you’re actually batshit crazy, you know that?” He says that, but he still climbs up onto the bike, barely heavier than Gon’s school backpack as he holds on his back. Gon hums, smelling magic and ozone.

“I’ve been told. But you have fun with me, right Killua?”

The answer is a flustered mumble pressed on his shoulder, but it’s enough to make Gon’s grin widen as he rides right inside a streak of puddles.

*

The weather is being impossibly crazy, Mito is quite disconcerted, and so is every single one of her clients today.

Mrs What’s Her Name is recalling the hardships of operating an umbrella to come here.

“And I swear, the wind was so strong it just slipped from my hands.” She accepts the receipt from Mito’s smelly hands. 

“Well, maybe we’ll finally accept that climate change does in fact exist,” she says, because what is there to say? Fishermen have already talked both of her ears off about how weird the weather has been in the last few days, and that’s why the prices of anchovies and basses have gone up abruptly. No fried anchovies tonight, she’ll have to break the promise and make something else—she hates it.

It’s pretty unusual for Gon to ask for anything, even something as simple as a dish. He’s always been an independent kid, but sometimes he acts like he’s a guest in their own house—it makes her wonder, uncomfortably, if she ever made him feel unwanted. And then she gets mad, because they all know who’s the one who made Gon feel unwanted in the first place.

She wraps up the last sole fish and then she’s free, hands perpetually smelling and back perpetually tired. 

She puts her rain cape on just to be sure, but when she’s just a corner away from home the sky looks finally at peace, clear after all that sudden wind. Still, the beach is empty, umbrellas all closed—at least the ones that haven’t been uprooted by the wind. This crazy weather sure is a pity for tourist season.

Maybe it’s because she’s distracted, but she almost takes the wrong turn, braking suddenly when she catches the stranger standing in front of her door.

“Excuse me, can I help you?” she asks to his long, black hair, as fast as she’s hopped down off the bike. Gon’s one isn’t there, so he must still be loafing around instead of doing his homework. 

The stranger turns and Mito feels a sharp pang of uneasiness when his black eyes scrutinize her from head to toes, like she was some kind of talking, walking puppet—he definitely looks like some kind of puppet.

“Yes please,” he says. “Who would you be?”

Mito blinks, then turns to assure herself that there aren't in fact any other people around and definitely not someone behind her.

“You’re in front of my door. Who would _you_ be,” she asks then, wary. She feels the solid coldness of her phone inside her pocket. 

The person tilts his head slowly, like an owl, and some strands of hair shift on his shoulders. 

That feeling—what was its name? When something resembles a human being so much but it’s not, and you grow more and more repulsed by it.

Mito is sweating. 

“I’m just a casual passerby,” he says, sounding just as casual as a very bad actor. “I was searching for someone, maybe you can help me?”

Mito breathes through the nose and nods. 

“Let’s try then.”

“I’m searching for Ging Freecs. He should live here.”

He should live here, of course he should. That has always been the problem, really.

“But he doesn’t. I live here,” she tells him. “You’re in the wrong place.”

He doesn’t frown—he doesn’t even seem able to, but he does look somewhat upset, in a way so eerie that Mito ends up clutching at her phone a little bit harder. 

“So it seems,” the guy says, nodding to himself. “This is no good. But your name is Freecs, do you know where I could find Ging?”

“I have no idea where he is, probably on the peak of some darn mountain or under six feet of sand, for all I care.”

She stands her ground, feet wide and planted, chin up and the most intimidating face she can muster up. He’s walking towards her and Mito doesn’t really understand what is it that’s frightening her so much; he’s way taller than her, but also slender and his body language isn't threatening, not really. He’s just… He’s closer, now; he looks at her from above, right in her eyes and Mito knows that she can’t breathe. She can’t move. The only thing she can do is not look away—not look like a victim, someone he could step on. She isn’t—she won’t be. 

His eyes are black in a way that can’t be natural, they peer inside Mito’s own eyes as if they were dissecting her from the inside out and she knows, then, that he would kill her, no sentiment attached, like she was some kind of disposable object instead of a human being.

“Who are you?” She’s surprised at the sound of her voice, the way it comes out way angrier than scared, because this stranger just came out of nowhere to threaten her; he came to her house, near her family, near her, as if it was his right to do so—fuck that.

He blinks, finally, and it’s like a spell has been broken; he’s still there, too damn close, but his presence isn’t as suffocating anymore.

“You’re telling the truth.” He sounds slightly surprised. He sighs, and Mito can’t tell how old he is, because he suddenly looks like a pretty bored boy just right out of school. “This isn’t good at all, I’ll never find it before Killua like this. Did you happen to see a boy with white hair, maybe?”

Mito frowns, more composed but still definitely out of her depth. 

“A boy with _white_ hair?”

“He likes to pretend I’m the one who made them become like that. He can be pretty funny sometimes,” the guy says. He doesn’t make any sense, that’s what: he keeps talking to her like they’re friends—no, like Mito is just some echo chamber.

“I can easily imagine that,” she answers, throat dry. The guy doesn’t respond, he’s already walking away, until Mito feels a shift in his posture.

“Please, let me know if Ging Freecs ever comes back,” he tells her. “Or Killua.”

“Who?” Mito asks, but he’s already turned, hair swishing in his wake. 

Mito stays there, frozen, until she blinks and he’s gone, just like that. He didn’t walk away, he’s just gone. 

“What the hell did just happen?” she says, one hand still grasping her phone and eyes watching at the grass that Gon promised to mow now two days ago.

She opens the door with trembling hands, and closes it behind her back with a huge sigh. 

Her heart is still running.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next half of the fic is pure shambles, friends. Please send me good editing vibes XD

Gon is falling. Until he’s not, because he’s flying instead.

Maybe that’s a tad bit dramatic—the bike isn’t exactly flying, but it sure feels like a powerful vacuum cleaner is sucking it from behind, wheels barely touching the ground and all control lost. 

He tries to scream Killua’s name, but there’s a hand pressed on his mouth. Then the last gusts of wind die away and Gon yelps on Killua’s palm. At the same moment, the bike falls on its side, dragging them both with it.

The crack is deafening; it bounces on Gon’s teeth and leaves him stunned for a bit, like his head is trying to find its own neck. He finds the ground first; when he tries to move, his elbow starts screaming in pain.

“Killua,” he tries again, and pulls his leg out of the skeleton of the bike. One of the wheels is bent. 

“Shit,” Killua says. There’s something red falling from his eyebrow and down into his fringe, which is weird because that’s definitely not the right direction. 

“Are you okay?” Gon asks, even if the ringing in his ears isn’t stopping at all. 

Killua swears again but his voice sounds a bit too desperate for Gon to reprimand him about it. 

“I’m sorry. I’ve screwed up,” he tells him, and Gon isn’t really sure what exactly he’s talking about, because everything is kind of a wreck at the moment. 

Killua rolls, feet on the ground and head up with a spin, and that’s how he comes back on two feet, just to fall on his knees a bit closer to Gon, who’s still sitting there, confused. The numbness is overcoming the pain right now; his body thinks it’s brilliant and Gon doesn’t feel like disagreeing.

Killua swears again, louder, and he’s definitely looking at Gon now. At his arm—his elbow, which is bent in the wrong direction and swelling rapidly, pulsing with a pain that feels like big, bouncing bubbles under his skin, crushing down his bone. 

Gon knows that feeling. Dang it.

“I think it’s broken,” he declares, quite clinically. 

Killua’s eyes are ready to conjure another storm. 

“Of course it’s broken, you dumbass,” he says instead, but all the venom in his voice really doesn’t seem directed at Gon or his elbow. “Shit. Can you move it?”

Gon lowers his gaze; the swelling is angry red.

“I don’t think I’d like that. I broke my other arm once and it hurt pretty bad when I tried to move it. It should be fine, though. They say that when you break a bone and then heal it nicely, it grows back even stronger than before! I’ll have, like, a super arm maybe.”

It’s almost comical, the way Killua’s face scrunches up like he has to really suppress the urge to smack him on the head. 

Instead, he literally picks Gon up like he was a broken broom instead of a whole person just a bit shorter than him. Maybe that too is magic; Gon’s head feels light and Killua’s hands are cool as he deposits him on the nearest bench.

They’ve ended up on the nice, long sidewalk that runs along the seafront. The beach is empty and dark now, but there are still enough people around, all looking at them with worried faces. An adult voice asks if they should call an ambulance.

“Killua,” Gon tries, while Killua is intent on simultaneously swearing, barking to keep every passerby away and picking up the bike. The front-wheel falls down tragically on the ground.

“Just… Try to resist, I’m thinking.” Gon can hear the loud screeching of the gears inside his head even over the burning, pulsing pain that’s starting to spread from his arm up to the roof of his mouth. He presses his other hand on his forehead; it helps to center him a bit.

“What happened? Is Aunt Mito okay?”

Killua turns towards him, fast and with a flash of guilt and fear in his eyes so sharp that Gon feels all of it way stronger than any physical pain. 

“Who was that guy? Is she…”

“She should be safe.” Averted eyes and strained voice; that doesn’t sound reassuring at all. “He was going away and he didn’t look like… I mean, it didn’t look like he was going to do something bad. I know when he does.”

Gon grabs a bit too hard at his injured arm.

“Killua, who was that guy?” The pain is clearing his head instead of clogging up his thoughts. Gon rode the bike around the corner and caught nothing more than her figure, long colorful skirt and short red hair in the wind. Aunt Mito is the bravest person he knows and that face: he never really saw that scared face on her _ever_. When he tried to call her, Killua shut him up with one hand and they started flying backward.

“He was… I had to run.” Killua must be totally sincere; no one can look that frightened and lying at the same time. “I just had to. I’m sorry for your arm. And your bike,” he says, just as the handlebar fall too, on his foot.

Gon grabs at the backrest of the bench to try and stand up even if his arm feels as broken as the bike looks. 

“I don’t care. We have to go back, If he’s dangerous, I don’t want him around Aunt Mito. Please, Killua,” he adds, and maybe it’s pity—maybe it’s something else that Killua feels, like magic; something that Gon knows is burning deep inside his diaphragm and in his eyes. 

Killua’s eyes warm up too, and some of that viscous, abrasive fear that was still clinging inside them clears away. 

“Okay. Right, sure. Let’s go,” he says, and Gon takes his hand. 

*

They do indeed go, but it’s quite the process. They managed to deter every interested stranger from getting involved by dragging both themselves and the broken bike down on the beach, behind a long row of paddle boats up for rent. 

Then Killua made the pieces of the bike levitate and he blew on it so that they became transparent, just like Killua himself when he inhaled so much air Gon was pretty sure he would have burst.

They’re now walking like that, Gon alone on the sidewalk with his arm pressed on his chest, every step a jolt of pain up from the fingers to his brain; still, he doesn’t stop, not even when Killua pokes him hard on the shoulder, his movements so frantic that Gon can actually follow them even under that weird chameleon-spell.

“Just one sec,” Killua decides though, when they’re finally once again right around the corner, sea hidden by buildings and Gon’s house there, standing unchanged right over the fence.

Gon makes a point of eyeing from Killua to the deserted front garden and the even more deserted street, but Killua is so damn worried he can’t really say no. 

He lifts both hands and Gon has never seen him look so scary, rivulet of dry blood still smeared over his forehead. He conjures something Gon definitely can’t see, but feel nonetheless—it’s warmer than air and it has a distinct smell; of ozone, again, and petrichor, even if this time no storm is brewing. Whatever it is, it fills the space under their feet and spreads, touching the ground and every corner, slipping under parked cars and hedges until Killua exhales and coughs for good measure, bent on his knees. The weird halo of energy disappears, then.

“Okay. He’s not here anymore, we’re safe,” he tells Gon. With blood on his face, a broken floating bike on the side and Gon’s own beaten up appearance right in front, he really doesn’t seem that sure. 

*

“But how,” Aunt Mito has given up scolding him and she’s now resorted to interrogation. Gon is keeping up pretty well, given that his elbow is still pretty broken and there’s still no doctor in sight. 

“You have to be more careful, Gon, you’re not a kid anymore.” Mito’s voice lowers as the father with the sleeping baby throws her a murderous glance. “I mean, you still are, but you’re growing up and you should be way more responsible than this. You can’t just throw yourself headfirst into everything…”

“It was an accident,” Gon tries, only for the third time. “I lost control of the bike. On a puddle.”

Mito frowns, worry wrestling with anger inside her gaze.

“What were you doing around in the first place? You promised me you would mow the lawn, but the lawn was pretty much unmowed when I came back from work.”

Gon waits for her to continue, but her eyes kinda lose focus, like she’s contemplating something scary over the rim of the Crocs she forgot to change before she started screaming at him and simultaneously loading him on the car to drag him to the ER.

“Are you okay, Aunt Mito?”

She bolts back in the present, eyes wide.

“Yes, of course I am. I’m not the one with a broken arm… We have a yellow code here! Do we have to wait until you’ll have to amputate his arm?” 

“If the code is yellow,” the closest nurse tells her, with a smile that screams night shift and also murder, “then I’m sure there will be nothing to amputate.”

“That’s a relief,” Gon says, even if aunt Mito is still fuming. 

“Sorry,” she then adds, even if the nurse is already trotted away, carrying a trail and answering way ruder questions from other people in the waiting room—ERs are crazy and every time Gon ends up in a place that’s packed with humans he remembers how much more comfortable he feels with animals instead. “I’m just… I hope it’s not a complex fracture.”

“I don’t think so,” Gon says, feeling pretty optimistic despite the pain. “It hurts, but I’m also okay.”

“Which in your case is definitely not an index of any specific wellbeing.” Mito sighs hard inside her cupped hands. “I’m just… You were so happy Kite was coming to visit, this is definitely going to spoil it.”

Gon blinks twice. Thrice, actually, and for a moment the whiteness of rustling hospital noises fills both his ears like a boiling liquid. 

“Oh no,” he hears himself say, mouth agape. “You’re right, Kite is coming!”

Mito studies him, even more worried.

“Are you sure you didn’t hit your head when you fell, dear?”

But Gon is already trying to facepalm with his wrong hand, which results in a yelp and him bending over his poor arm. 

“I was so busy with Killua that I didn’t really think about it.” He’s mumbling to Mito’s Crocs and his own muddy shoes.

“Excuse you, what did you kill?”

“Nothing!” Gon says, fast and still fighting a strong jolt of pain, eyes watery and breath sharp. “I mean, I… school, you know? And stuff! It slipped my mind!”

“Mister Freecs?” the same nurse as before calls, unfazed by the chaos. 

Gon can’t really get too desperate; Mito is already shoving him over the door, one hand firm between his shoulders. 

*

Broken bones suck. Arms in a cast suck even more. But what sucks irredeemably is that Kite is going to be there for the weekend and Gon’s arm is going to be a useless, chalky appendage.

“I can believe I forgot Kite was coming,” he tells the ceiling. It’s white, but at least it’s inside his room instead of the hospital: it turned out the break was pretty clean, so they just patched him up and sent him home instead of subjecting him to some painful, boring medical procedure. The CT-scan and the x-ray were already boring enough. Gon isn’t sure if the dizziness is coming from the painkillers they gave him or from that special mix of chaotic noises and sharp smells that makes up every hospital just like their repetitive furniture.

He sighs hard and shifts his head to look at the tea Abe brought up for him. He doesn’t really feel like drinking it, so he just left it there to watch the steam unfurl up in the air. 

He blinks at the first knock and he’s sitting up when the second comes. There it is, a floating rock as big as Gon’s fist, thumping against the window.

He must shifts off the bed quietly, because Aunt Mito declared she was having the worst hospital-related headache of her life and went to sleep early.

As fast as Gon sticks his head out of the window, the rock falls down.

“Killua!” he calls, in a whisper.

He’s there, looking small from above, hair ruffled by the slight breeze. Even that far, he gives off an air of mistrust. 

“How’s the arm?” 

Gon finds himself snickering before he flails the cast out of the window.

“Still attached, I feel okay!” He signs with one finger to wait there for a moment. He stretches an ear for any sounds coming from the house, but everything is quiet. “Come in, I’ll open the door!”

Maybe he didn’t hear him, because Killua remains there, high-strung, like he hasn’t understood. 

“Come inside, I’m going to…”

“You want me to come inside?”

“Yes!” Gon says, with urgency. They can’t talk like this, they’re going to wake up Mito. But Killua has other, louder plans. 

“I… Aren’t you mad at me?” he asks, voice strained. 

Gon squints at him, then brings his head back inside and squints at his own reflection on the open window.

“What?” he asks himself, before looking out again. “Why would I be?”

“Are you stupid? I broke your arm!” At least Killua’s voice has regained its sassy undertone.

“You didn’t break my arm. Falling from the bike did!" And people call him weird. They never befriended magical folks with superpowers, definitely.

“I hexed your bike, then you fell from it, hence it’s my fault you broke your arm!”

“You should hex yourself up here before Aunt Mito wakes up, then,” Gon rebuts, grinning, and Killua—his shoulders fall, his head follows them and then he presses both hands really hard into his eye sockets, like he’s willing to make them pop on the other side. Gon is definitely confused, now.

“Come on, I can make you hot cocoa!” Right, that’s actually what he’d really like to drink instead of tea—tea is for sick people and he’s not sick. He can’t be sick: Kite is coming!

Killua growls and it’s fine: at least that’s a sound that might actually occur in a backyard where potential stray dogs can walk. Then—he doesn’t fly, but when he jumps, it’s a bit too high to be natural, accompanied by a gust of sudden wind as if he was surfing over it. He lands vertically on the wall for a moment and then he’s off again, hands grasping at Gon’s windowsill. He lifts himself up and climbs inside, looking way more normal and way more tired under the room’s soft, yellowish light. 

Gon looks at him, pale and disheveled and the first thing that comes to his mind is to launch himself to grab at his shoulders with both arms, broken or not, and squeeze.

Killua remains there, still like a frightened cat, his pointy chin thrust into Gon’s own neck.

“What,” he says, strangled. “What’s this all about.”

“I’m just happy you’re here! I thought you had run away, since you were so scared today.”

Killua’s arms are fast and long, they appear in between them to reclaim some space; pushing hard at first and then just way lighter, once the plaster cast returns inside his line of vision. 

“I wasn’t _scared_ , I was just…” he stops, mouth closed. “I was just being cautious. I actually saved your dumb life, if you want to know!”

Gon frowns.

“Did you?” he asks, but Killua is already blushing, even if it’s really difficult to understand why. He takes a step back, and crosses his arms. 

“Well, it sure as hell wouldn’t have been fun for you to meet Illumi. Maybe he wouldn’t have killed you, just… obliviate you or something like that.” He lifts one hand to gesture something vague and clearly ominous. “You can never really be sure with him.”

Illumi. Gon sits back down on his bed and the mattress bounces under him. 

“His name sounds a bit like yours.”

“Yeah, all of my siblings’ names sound the same. Our parents have an awful sense of humor.”

Oh. That maybe explains stuff—and elicits so many more questions. 

Killua bounces on the ball of his feet, but it’s definitely a nervous demeanor; he uncrosses his arms, undecided, and digs both hands deep inside his pockets.

“Listen,” he starts, and he’s diverting his eyes. “I shouldn’t have involved you in this thing. I’m really fucking sorry. I know it doesn’t fix your arm, but…”

“You could, though! Fix my arm!”

Killua steps back.

“I can’t.”

“But you heal yourself all the time! So maybe you could…”

“I really, really don't think that would be good, I—I’m not that good with healing. I don’t want to mess it up more.”

Gon blinks at him, and then at his cast.

“Oh. Okay then, don’t worry. It will be fine, really, it doesn’t hurt.” He waves a bit to prove it and it doesn’t really hurt—he isn’t lying—only it may be mostly thanks to the painkillers. “It’s just that Kite is coming and I’d really liked to have both hands…”

Killua looks at him for the first time, eyebrows tilted and face confused.

“The Kite guy you told me about?”

“He’s the coolest guy ever,” Gon says, truthful. “He’s my godfather and he’s super awesome. I told you, I’m sure he could help… You should definitely meet him!”

Killua is still looking at him, incredulous; he shakes his head then, and crouches on the floor with a deep, wet sigh.

“Man, you’re crazy.”

Gon giggles; that’s old news, really.

“Maybe.”

Killua sighs again, shoulders scrunched and spying him from the shadow of his fringe, like he isn’t really sure he should meet his eyes. 

“Gon, listen.” 

“Yes,” Gon says, eager, and that makes Killua sigh even deeper. Once again, he’s diverting his eyes.

“You’ve been pretty fucking helpful. I really wanted to thank you for the food and the bed and the games too, that was fun,” he adds, as an afterthought.

“We should play again, then.” Gon isn’t dumb; Killua is definitely going to say that they will not play again. Speeches like that always end up with people explaining what they think is the only possible solution and how everything else isn’t going to work. 

“Maybe,” Killua says, which is better than never; but he’s still clenching his fists hard and his face is serious and a bit desperate too. “But not right now. I’ll have to find the thing, remember? And I think it’s better if I search for it alone.”

“I know I’m not very helpful,” Gon says, and flails his cast a bit more—Killua’s probably going to get a nervous twitch about that. “But I can still help.”

“But you don’t’ _have_ to. So, thank you for…”

“But I want to.”

Their eyes finally meet and Gon knows he’s doing that thing that makes Aunt Mito go berserker—it’s pretty effective on Killua, too. The twitch is still definitely there when he growls.

“Listen, you idiot! You want to know why I can’t heal your arm?”

Gon tilts his head, confused.

“Because it’s difficult?” he asks. Killua growls again and he’s going to wake up Mito and Abe, and maybe the whole neighborhood. 

“No, it’s because no one taught me!” he says, in an angry, brutal whisper. “Because my family thinks that healing spells are useless, that’s why. I don’t heal stuff, I just… We broke stuff, that’s what we do.”

Gon would almost like to tell him, once again, that he didn’t really break his arm, but of course Killua isn’t talking about that.

Gon roosts himself over the rim of the bad and puts up his most serious face. 

“You don’t break stuff, Killua. Your magic is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

For a moment, flicker and brief inside Killua’s eyes, Gon knows that he must know: that it’s true; or at least it is for Gon. 

Killua shakes his head, fluffy hair bouncing. 

“It’s not. I… you don’t know even a fraction of the fucked up shit I can do. I can level entire cities, I can convince people to do stuff, sick stuff. I can break bones, like, for real. I can hurt and I can jinx and I—”

“But you didn’t do any of these things.” Gon is trying, really, to understand what Killua is saying, because it looks important to him, but at the same time it’s like he’s speaking a different language. Gon was there—they’ve been together for days and the only time something bad happened it was because somebody else got involved and Killua wasn’t acting evil, he was acting scared. And, anyway, Gon is still pretty sure that the broken arm is entirely his own fault, since he was the one who, you know, fell onto it like a dumbass. The flying bicycle might have been surprising, but it’s still almost tangential to the problem. 

“You don’t understand. I should definitely obliviate you myself, at least Illumi wouldn’t kill you thinking you’re lying if he ever comes to you,” Killua says, but he’s mumbling at his own hands. Gon studies him for a bit, then he leans forward and smacks him on the head.

The look Killua returns him is downright scandalized.

“What was that for!”

“Don’t oblate me,” Gon says. He’s pretty sure that’s not the word just like it’s definitely not the point. “Is Illumi really that scary? Isn’t he your brother, though? Shouldn’t he be on your side?”

Killua is still keeping both his hands on his head. 

“Illumi? On my… Hell, no.” He frowns, bewildered at the concept. “Well, I mean, it’s not like he… He’s on. My side. He’s just… No one is ever on her side, though, so someone should be and… It doesn’t matter! I’m just trying to come up with a way to keep you safe, now that he knows where you live!”

“Let’s just talk to him.”

That makes Killua scoff, like Gon has just said the most ludicrous, preposterous thing. 

“Yeah, sure!” He hits his forehead with one hand. “Why didn’t I think about it myself, it was obvious! I’ll just go and talk to him, just like I tried to talk with dad!” 

Gon smiles, because that’s an awesome idea, really, only it’s also probably sarcasm. 

“I tell you what, I’m going to gather them all, mom and dad and grandpa too. I’ll make some tea, get them comfortable and tell them all about my plan to release evil entities!”

“Is that your plan? To release evil entities?”

“They’re not evil!” Killua rebuts, loud and forceful. “Or at least she definitely isn’t!”

“I’m not following you.”

“Of course you aren’t! You’re just a dumb human!”

Gon almost falls from the bed just to make a point.

“That’s super rude. And maybe I am dumb, okay, but you’re not explaining _anything_ , so—”

“They kill people!” Killua yells, eyes huge and hands both flailing. He stops mid-air for a second, like he didn’t really want to say that, but now he did and he can’t stop himself anymore. “Blood magic is the most powerful kind of magic, the more the blood the more powerful the magic and my family is powerful.”

Gon blinks.

“But you don’t—”

“But I did, I told you! And really, that’s why I don’t want you or anybody else near Illumi, because he’s not going to think it over, he’s just going to kill you because you’re annoying and—”

“Do you think I’m annoying?” Gon asks, and, really, Killua looks on the verge of strangling him.

“How is that the point! You’re such a dumb human, I can’t even—”

They both stop, Gon from yelling about why is uncool to call him dumb and human like they’re both insults and Killua from pacing like a madman around the room. 

The floor creaks near right outside the room and that’s enough for Killua to hold his breath fast and dissolve into thin air, and for Gon to bounce back on the mattress to muster up his most surprised and innocent expression. 

The door squeaks on its hinges and Aunt Mito’s head peeps inside, followed by the rest of her pink pajamas, feet light on the floor and eyes way more awake that they should be at almost one in the morning.

“Gon, who were you talking to?” 

Spread on the mattress with his phone lazily plopped on his own stomach, Gon smiles.

“I was just watching some videos on Eyetube, Aunt Mito. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

Their eyes meet and Mito is definitely suspicious; but Killua is invisible right now, and nothing in the room hints at the presence of somebody else. 

She looks around, frowning harder when she catches the open window. 

“It’s not too warm tonight, just keep this closed, okay?”

She walks to close it herself, and Gon watches her spying out of the windowsill with open concern. 

“Is everything okay, Aunt Mito?”

She snaps out of whatever thought she was trapped in and nods. 

“Sure. How’s your arm?”

“Pretty good, it doesn’t hurt at all!”

She smiles, this time way more like herself—which means she's also scowling as she pokes him on the forehead.

“Of course, that’s what we’re going to tell Kite, I guess.”

Gon grins.

“Yes, because it’s the truth!”

Mito sighs. 

“Go to sleep, Gon. I’m going to drop you to school tomorrow, since your bike is in shambles.”

Gon bites his tongue and she snorts. 

“Good night, dear.” She isn’t always sweet, but she is always lovable and Gon returns the hug, basking in the sensation when she lingers to scratch his scalp a bit. “I’ll burn that phone if you don’t turn it off immediately,” she adds, right before stepping out of the room, lights off, leaving him in the dark. 

Gon sighs hard and leaves the phone on the nightstand, right beside the tea he didn’t drink. He said he wanted to make hot cocoa—he forgot. 

“Killua,” he asks, with the lowest whisper in the dark. “Do you want cocoa?”

The floor doesn’t creak. Gon blinks as his eyes adjust to separate the outlines of the furniture from their surroundings. Nothing moves and a pang of sudden anxiety pinches at his sternum.

“Killua?” he asks again, sitting up quietly. The bed frame creaks. “Are you still here?”

He gets up and pads toward the window, feet wary to step on some other feet on accident, but nothing seems out of order. Nothing seems to be there.

Gon closes his eyes and sniffs around, chest heavy and throat tight. 

The smell of ozone still lingers like a faint trail, but Killua is gone.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I highly doubt anybody feels even remotely tense while reading this thing, but know that i still feel kinda sorry for the (accidental) cliffhanger-ish ending XD  
> Anyway, rip Pokkle.

Gon wakes up with something heavy on his chest that doesn’t really go away. He tries to roll on his side and smacks himself with the plaster cast; after the painkillers wore off, his broken arm definitely hurts enough that even Aunt Mito has decided to take his third attempt at ignoring her calls seriously.

“I don’t think I should go to school today, I'm not feeling that good.” 

Mito's eyebrows are flat, her face inflexible.

“That’s what we’ll say to Kite when he asks if you’re up to windsurfing or bungee gum or whatever other absurd activity he has planned for you two, I guess.”

“I’m not… I’ll be fine!” Gon won't point out that it’s called bungee jumping. “I just think I should get well rested for when he’s going to come, that’s all. And, anyway, I can’t really write exercises if I can’t use my right arm? Poor Knuckle would have to write everything for me and that’s super unfair, isn’t it?”

“Sure. Poor Knuckle." She sizes him up and maybe Gon does look at least a bit as bad as he feels, because her next move is to place a hand on his forehead. Her palm is rough, but cool and gentle; she’s the absolute best at giving scratches, Gon feels his eyelids grow heavier, his body sink into the mattress.

Mito sighs.

“I’ll call the school to tell them you’re staying at home today—only for today, Gon. Don’t think you’re off the hook, you still have homework to do.”

Gon tries to subdue the sudden spark that pinched his mouth upward.

“I swear, Aunt Mito, I’m going to pass math!”

She ruffles his hair and mumbles something that sounds a lot like resignation, but she leaves him be, steps creaking as she walks downstairs.

Gon feels lighter, but it isn’t relief. He just can’t get out of the bed, not even for the smell of Abe’s chocolate chips waffles. Not even to pretend that he feels well enough to spend the weekend adventuring with Kite. 

He’s just—his chest is heavy and his eyes wander toward the window once again.

Killua’s stormy smell is definitely gone and Gon doesn’t know any spell to make him come back to him. 

They don’t talk about magic at home. Gon has always, always known it was a thing; just as he has always, always known that he had to keep his mouth shut about it. And now, when he had finally found someone who really gets it, he’s gone and he’s alone once again, waiting. For something to happen, to spark that interest in him, that feeling of doing something meaningful and exciting and real. 

Homework, it doesn’t feel real at all. 

He finally finds the energy to drag himself out of bed to go sit at his desk, but he can’t concentrate on books. He flips the pages gingerly and tries to read the exercise, but it sounds like another language inside his head. 

He presses his back into the chair and starts swinging on it. The air is once again hot, dry as it gets in the city sometimes, even if the sea is still close. It was never like this when Gon used to live on Whale Island, surrounded by the ocean from every direction.

He misses it—the house on the cliff, bigger than this one and very much older; the way it creaked at night when the wind came strong from the ocean, to blow it up and crush it on the rocks below. He misses the forest, more than everything else, running through it, jumping and sitting very still to fish in the salted pond. 

Mito told him that he would miss all that but also find another million things to love, friends and places to explore—instead, despite the sea still being so close, the city is just a city, the people are just people and the other kids really don’t get what Gon is talking about half of the time; just like Gon can’t make himself get interested in Instagram posts and pop music. They can have fun together for a bit during PE, and that’s fine; they can talk sometimes and even laugh together, but it’s not like having adventures—it’s not like having friends. 

“At least Kite is coming,” he says, to the corkboard that’s half full of Kite’s own postcards and some photos of their past holidays. Kite always brings him to visit cool places when it isn’t too dangerous; maybe this year he will bring him somewhere even more exciting, now that Gon is thirteen and tall enough to get onto the deadliest rollercoasters. Maybe. 

He still needs Aunt Mito’s permission to do stuff. He swings and sighs, sighs and swings.

If Killua had at least told him something more about the teapot, he could have helped more. Killua himself said that Gon must be somehow connected to the thing—only Gon wasn’t helpful at all, just a dumb human, and this adventure doesn’t have anything to do with him.

He swings again. If Greed Island was real, he would use Magnetic Force to get back to Killua and then use something like Peek or Fluoroscopy to look inside his head and finally understand what’s really going on.

“That would be messed up." What he’d really like, would be for Killua to just _trust_ him. 

But maybe he is asking too much. He must be. People don’t get attached after a couple of days of discombobulated adventures and shared meals, that just isn’t how people work and Gon should start getting used to it because it isn’t going to change—that’s just how things are.

Gon has never been good at letting things be the way they are, though.

Abe catches him with one leg out of the window as he tries to climb down the wall—it’s not the first time he does it, it’s just proving to be a bit more difficult with a broken arm.

They look at each other for three long seconds, Abe behind a pile of waffles. Her eyes twinkle, and Gon grins.

“Sorry. I was—I’m just a bit restless.”

Abe doesn’t say anything, but her wrinkles don’t relax until Gon’s feet are both back inside his room.

“I’ve brought snacks. And milk too, for the bones.” She places a tall glass on the nightstand and sits down on the bed, still unmade. “Calcium and glucose are just what you need. What about a story?” she adds, patting the mattress beside her.

Gon tilts his head.

“You want to tell me a bedtime story?”

Abe places the plate between them and hands him a fork.

“You want me to tell you a bedtime story? It’s pretty early for that. Or late. But we’re sitting on a bed, so maybe it’s still bedtime.”

“I guess. But I like your stories anytime,” Gon says, and it's the truth.

Abe is still smiling. Gon is quite sure he’s never seen her upset ever, not even over Mito’s parents or Ging, who aren’t there anymore even if for completely different reasons. 

She forks a generous piece of waffle.

“I was thinking more about you tell a story to me. Would that be alright?”

“Oh,” Gon blurts, befuddled. “I guess that’s fine too. What kind of story would you like to hear?”

“One about magic. Ging used to tell me a lot of those when he was around your age.”

Gon forks a piece of waffle too, but he can’t find in himself to take a bite.

“Well, I… I met a wizard—no, sorry, he’s a sorcerer. He’s pretty serious about it. He’s also really pretty."

Abe snorts the smallest laugh.

“How come,” she says.

“I mean, objectively! He has this fluffy hair, soft like a cloud, and these amazing blue eyes and he’s also super smart and funny to be around. And strong! You know those weird storms these past days?” He shifts on the mattress to whispers in her ear. “It was him.”

Abe doesn’t stop chewing. 

“He was the storm?” 

Gon laughs and shakes his head.

“Of course not, but he did call to it? Like, he said some magic words and the storm came! It was incredible.”

“I bet it was. And why did he call a storm?”

“Oh, it’s because we had to distract Mister Tonpa, back at school… He’s searching for something. Killua, not Mister Tonpa. Killua is the sorcerer’s name.”

“Nice name. It really sounds like an adventure, sorcerers searching for something.”

“It is!” Gon says, and pulls off a grin only for it to be wiped as fast as he looks out of the window.

“What is it, dear?” Abe asks, head tilted on the side to follow his gaze, fork still in hand.

Gon shakes his head, the piece of waffle leaves a chocolate smear on the plate.

“Nothing, just… I mean, it’s an adventure but it’s really Killua’s adventure, not mine. I just happened to get involved by accident. And now he cut me out, he’s gone and I don’t know where.”

Abe’s eyebrows flail on her small forehead.

“But dear, this isn’t a book. If you want an adventure, go out there and get it. It’s what Ging would do,” she adds, thoughtful.

“It’s because of magic, right? That Ging decided to travel around the world."

Abe smiles and she’s definitely going to finish those waffles alone if Gon doesn’t catch up. 

“He couldn’t stay in a place that was too small. It’s a miracle he didn’t leave when he was your age. He tried, though,” she says, pensive. “If we lived in some kind of fantasy world, one like the Pokèmon kind, he would have definitely left by the time he was ten. He had to finish school first instead. And it’s a good thing, because then he could pick up a thing or two, or two hundred, and get himself a couple of degrees too, which you don’t need to live or to be incredibly talented, of course, but it sure made things easier when he tried to get visas to go visit all kinds of different places and sneak his nose into very ancient stuff.” 

Gon follows her gaze. She’s studying some of the souvenirs Ging has sent over the years, dinosaurs’ teeth and funny utensils that museums had already too many of; colorful stones and traditional tools made with ropes and feathers. Aunt Mito calls it junk, but Gon likes to collect them on shelves. 

“I think I’d really like to see all those places. I’d sure like it way more than math.”

“You’ll be able to. You just have to wait a few years, to better decide for yourself.”

“I’ve already decided. I’ll never be the kind of person Aunt Mito would like me to be. I just don’t have it in me to stay still and study and…”

“Oh, you’re so wrong, dear,” Abe says, giggling. “Maybe not the kind of student, but you’re already the kind of person your Aunt Mito likes you to be, no doubt about that.”

“Even if I’d really like to be a wizard when I grow up?”

Abe nods, solemn as she swipes the last piece of waffle. 

“She would love you if you were a wizard, a pirate and even if you ended up being just like Ging. You’d be an incredible wizard, dear.”

Gon knocks off the plate and hugs her really hard. 

*

That’s all poetic and inspiring, really, and Gon is happy that Abe is so supportive. He literally can’t wait to grow up, though, not with Killua missing right now.

He doesn’t climb out of the window, but he still spends the afternoon searching for him all around the neighborhood, even if aunt Mito yells at him and then yells at him the next day too. 

“It’s… I’ve lost something,” he tells her, on Friday, when she intercepts him while he was trying to sneak out unseen, shoes in hands and guilt-smeared face. 

“Okay, what is it. I could help you search for it,” she says, apron still in place after she had kneaded a whole pantry of dough to make her most famous stuffed pizza—seafood and spicy tomato, Kite’s favorite. 

“It’s okay, Aunt Mito,” he answers, and he’s putting on his shoes then, even if it’s pretty difficult to do so while standing and down one arm. “It’s just something I have to do.”

“What does that even mean!" She isn’t Killua, but Gon is sure she could conjure a storm even faster if she really wanted to. Since she’s also awesome, though, she opts to lend him an arm instead so that he can finish putting his shoe on. 

“It’s for one of my friends… I met him at school." That's technically the truth, right? “He lost this thing, you see, and he’s been very worried about it so we’ve searched for it these last days, only he doesn’t want me to meddle in his problems, but I should, right? I mean, he’s my friend and that’s what friends do, otherwise how do I know if we really are friends?”

He didn’t mean to talk that much, to make Mito’s frown deepen even more. She looks at him right in the eyes, searching for something.

“Let me drive you?” she asks then, and sighs when Gon deadpans at her. She shakes her head. “Right. Just… Don’t be late, at least if you want to come picking up Kite with me. Keep your phone where you can hear it.”

“I’ll be back in time!” Gon says. And he’s out, running. 

*

The plane maneuvers to land, taking a wide, rotating angle that makes the seats vibrate. Kite breathes through his nostril. The air is still the pressurized, static one of the cockpit and after nine hours Kite is well ready to be hurled in the closest swarming airport as long as his feet can get back on the solid ground.

He’s not fond of flying, despite having a license—that’s something you must have if you harbor the self-harming desire to go places with someone as mad crazy as Ging Freecs—and this flight has been an especially unpleasant experience, with the whole weather rioting against them. Kite had never seen so much fog that high, but he’s been practical about it: there isn’t that much you can do while on a plane, so he just lowered the hem of his cap to cover his eyes and slept off the first five hours, before the turbulence started and he had to let his neighbor squeeze his hand.

“Sorry, I know that statistically accidents are extremely unlikely…” he’s saying. They’re approaching the airport and lights are blinking lazily from the ground, signaling that civilization is still waiting for them. 

“It’s no problem,” Kite tells him. He wasn’t that bad of a company; he’s interested in zoology, even if maybe it wasn’t all academic concerns, given that his girlfriend is apparently an entomologist and dragged him into the field. She’s already waiting for him down there and Kite tries really hard to not look like someone who couldn’t care less.

“And you? Is there someone waiting for you?”

The airport is even closer now; the flight attendants are walking to make sure that everybody has fastened their belts.

“My godson, actually.” He doesn’t fight the familiar pinch of a smile lighting up his face. “He’s thirteen. And overly enthusiastic.”

“Ah, cool! Hope you got him a bunch of souvenirs.”

Kite frowns, but he finds himself nodding. 

“I brought a fair share of trinkets and something way more interesting. Actually, his father got it, took it straight out from an actual cave in the midst of a forest behind a waterfall. I’m really just delivering it.”

“You mean the archeologist guy?”

Kite nods, even if ‘archeologist guy’ doesn’t cover nearly a fraction of Ging’s expertise. 

The guy whistles.

“Quite the responsibility. And it really sounds like that souvenir should be displayed in a museum.”

“It doesn’t have any scientific value whatsoever,” Kite says. “And, anyway, Gon is no common thirteen year old.”

“Ging and Gon, really?” the guy says, and he’s squeezing way less now that he’s engrossed in a conversation. That’s good, Kite’s fingers were starting to hurt. 

“Ging and Gon,” he repeats.

The guy shrugs, still not convinced but amused nonetheless.

“What’s your name, anyway? Mine’s Pokkle.”

It’s nice to meet him, that’s what Kite should say. And he’s going to, he’s already opened his mouth—the screech startles him even if it’s muffled and far. And still, loud enough to be heard inside the plane. 

“What was—” His hand is being squeezed again, harder than before.

Kite breathes through the nose; something black and shapeless passes right before the window. He’s almost sure he’s seen feathers, then, and the empty stare of the crows as they crushed onto the plane in a flock. Crows don’t fly in flocks, that’s what Kite thinks.

“Bird strike,” he says instead, as the plane quakes. He can’t feel his hand anymore, ears ringing. He closes his eyes. Breathe through the nose. And concentrate oh so hard on not dying as the plane starts spiraling toward the ground. 

* 

It isn’t that rare of an occurrence for Gon to not understand something. It’s the description of his whole scholastic career, actually. 

He’s blinking, he knows he’s still blinking, but the scenery in front of him is still—his new-ish trainers perpetually smeared with soil and grass look even greener on the dull grey floor that looks like rubber. It’s squeaking under other people’s soles, shoes and crocs. There are a lot of crocs, colorful like fishes swimming on the reef. 

It’s a bit like diving, Gon used to do it a lot. He’s underwater, body light and compact under the pressure, sound muted, quiet. His head is full of air, he’s floating around his clogged up lungs and he can’t—he just doesn’t understand.

“Gon!”

The sound comes back in a rush and the smell, it slaps him so hard ìit's like his whole lungs could sense it. Gon blinks and his shoes are still there and so is Aunt Mito’s face, worried. Her hand is on Gon’s knee—he doesn’t know when it got there. He doesn’t know when _he_ got there.

He was searching for Killua around the neighborhood, then he got back to go pick up Kite at the airport, but Aunt Mito was flustered, eyes wide, while she explained that they had to go to the hospital instead.

“Yes,” he tells her. The crocs are just crocs and they’re walking around the feet of very busy people in scrubs. 

“I asked… Dear, are you feeling alright?”

Gon blinks at her. The words are really making a lot of effort to arrange themselves inside his head. He shakes it, but it doesn’t really help. 

“Yes,” he says. “I think I need to walk a bit. Would that be alright?”

“I can come with you,” Aunt Mito says, but she’s already looking at the other people sitting against white walls, while the muted tv entertains itself in the background, showing pictures of flames and airplanes and opinions Gon doesn’t understand at all. 

He knows they’re waiting—that’s a waiting room, it’s what it is. Only Gon can’t wait, he just can’t. 

“No, I want to go on my own. I’ll get back soon,” he says, even if he isn’t sure what time it is or when they got there exactly. He doesn’t remember, it’s like he swam there but without coming out of his own head.

He swims through the corridor too and it’s so long. How did he miss that it was so long? Did it just stretch right now? He feels lost, and floating. He bursts out from an emergency door on the side. The door slams behind his back and the air slaps him hard on the face, humid and quiet—like nothing happened. Like the world didn’t crash down just like that, in a flaming rumble from the sky.

He shakes his head again and keeps the air in for a couple seconds more than usual. 

It’s hot outside, the cicadas are screeching loud and if he thinks really hard he’s back on Whale Island, where it gets way more humid than this and the ocean shatters so loud on the coast that you can’t hear anything else. 

Here, Gon hears ambulances squealing up and down in a nauseating line of dazzling blue, bright and so painful he has to shut his eyes and curl up on himself— just a bit, to regroup and make sense of…

“I don’t understand,” he says, fingers grasping at the plaster cast; his broken arm has started pulsing right up to his jaw. “I don’t get it. I just don’t.”

He feels dizzy and when he blinks the yard is dark and he’s still sitting there, on the cobbled floor right near the dust bins. There’s steam coming from a bent metal chimney; it smells of canned soup and something citric and Gon’s stomach does a double flip as he swallows.

He should go back inside. Aunt Mito is still there, waiting, and Kite is still there—he knows he is, only… Something crinkles in his pocket when he shifts on his legs. He fishes inside his trousers and there it is, the Chocorobot wrapper. It’s still shiny, but wrinkles like lightning are carved into it after being scrunched up inside his pocket for days. Aunt Mito washed those pants too.

He had completely forgotten about that, about what Killua told him the first day.

“I really, really want to see Killua,” he says, feeling silly, but definitely not silly enough. Not confused or scared enough about magic and Killua and literally every single thing that would definitely freak Aunt Mito out.

The wrapper is blinking at him. Gon breathes through the nose.

He’s not magical, he can’t become magical overnight—he can’t be a wizard and he has never felt so frustrated about it. If he could do magic, Kite would be already healed; if he could do magic, nothing bad would have happened: he would have helped Killua from day one and they would have been even. Killua wouldn’t have left him behind just because he’s scared of his blood-magic-using family members or whatever it is that he’s really scared of.

“Blood magic, right,” Gon thinks—no, he said it aloud, there in the middle of the deserted backyard. He fishes inside his pockets: he’s always carrying the multi-purpose knife with him, you never know when it can be useful.

He should cut on the forearm because that’s where there aren’t major blood vessels so it’s safer—he isn’t dumb, he was listening to Killua, it was Killua who wasn’t listening to him—but he has only one hand available, so he juggles the pocket knife with his fingers and presses the pad of his thumb on the blade. It stings more than hurting and the blood trickles down on the wrapper as fast as he picks it up again. Gon looks intently at it, the way it smears the shiny surface with red splotches. It smells of iron, now, sharp inside his throat.

“I need to see Killua,” he repeats, like he’s giving it an order.

The wrapper blinks, or maybe that was Gon. He looks around because the smell of the hospital kitchen is suddenly gone and so is the quiet of the yard.

Instead, there’s smoke coming from the crashed plane, as the rain falls down heavy to smother oily flames that are still blazing from the ground up.

*

Killua isn’t even surprised anymore. Horrified never made much sense to him as a word entirely, so he just jumped directly onto angry, because this is bad even for Illumi’s standards. This is bad like dad-would-be-mad kind of bad.

He heard the crash—the sound is still rumbling between his gritted teeth while flames wrap around the fuselage crumpled on the ground.

The air is prickling with static, but maybe that’s Killua’s fault. His eyes are prickling too.

Illumi comes back in a spiral of crows, moving toward him like a small tornado until he steps on the ground, black hair, black eyes glinting red between the runway markings of the landing strip. Pretty ridiculous. And still scary like a creepy bedtime story.

Killua’s voice rings hollow to his ears.

“You crashed a plane. You crashed—”

“Yes, I must admit it was a bit out of line,” Illumi says, looking at the flaming debris, his face a humorless mask. “You know, I would have preferred for things go way smoother than this, Kill, but you had to go and make everything difficult.”

Killua doesn’t even register the accusation—being appointed as the source of all problems is a common occurrence when talking to Illumi. It’s always Killua who has done something wrong—who’s being stubborn, who isn’t obedient enough, compliant enough, who throws temper tantrums just for the sake of it and never ever knows his place.

Illumi almost— _almost_ —smiles, lips slightly tilted up in a way that doesn’t go anywhere near touching his eyes and still, he sometimes used to smile like this when they were kids and Killua mastered some difficult hex on his first try—after Illumi had tried it on him first.

“I’m happy you came back to your senses, Kill. Family is the only thing that matters in the end. I made sure to drill that inside your head.”

Killua tries oh so hard not to lower his head, but he’s already looking at his shoes—he had to come back. You can’t play hide-and-seek with Illumi, no one knows it better than him. It’s already a miracle he managed to disappear from his radar for that bright handful of days.

“Are you sure it’s there?” he asks, looking at the plane. There’s still commotion around, ambulances and firefighters and Killua itches to run there—the teapot can’t be broken this easily, there are spells protecting it, but Alluka is just a kid and maybe… Only Illumi doesn’t give a flying fuck about Alluka, nor does dad, for what matters.

“I’m sure. We’ll just have to wait for the humans to clean up the place a bit and then the family will get it back, as it’s supposed to be.” Sometimes Killua envies him, the way Illumi is unaffected by everything looks such a relief from the clasps of anxiety that buzzes inside Killua's chest. Illumi is always so sure of everything, while Killua is stuck constantly second-guessing his actions, his own thoughts. “You’ll be happy to know that Milluki has been punished for those foolish wishes. But I left the pleasure to destroy his figurines to you.”

Killua raises his gaze; he feels disembodied, hands tingling. He doesn’t care about Milluki and his dumb figurines, he doesn’t care about destroying—it’s useless, isn’t it? Illumi won’t listen.

“I don’t understand how you found it. I tried spells, but…” It’s a genuine question. Killua was sure about his calculations: he spent he doesn’t-know-how-many weeks of forced isolation preparing, he drained himself white trying to accumulate enough blood, enough energy to dislocate from the mansion’s grounds without being stopped by the wards, and he failed anyway. He who’s the one who knows Alluka best and the only one who’s ever bothered to know Nanika.

“I guessed you got the place right, but messed up the time? It’s not uncommon,” Illumi tells him with a didactic tone, the same as every other time he’s corrected Killua’s faulty spellcasting. “I preferred to act in a more rational fashion. The teapot usually appears in wild places and there’s always some power-hungry human searching for it… I narrowed down the list of people who could be interested in it and interrogate whoever seemed to carry valuable information. Mail-people were the most useful… Apparently, it’s an actual job,” he adds, like the concept of sending messages through anything else than witchcraft is definitely ludicrous and Killua should be as surprised as him.

Killua wasn’t thinking about mail.

“Are they dead?” he asks instead, and promptly regrets it, because Illumi’s eyes narrow as he studies the still busy carcass of the plane.

“Let’s go, or we’re going to take forever… You mean if I killed the mail-people?” he asks, genuinely perplexed for an entire second. “Of course they’re dead, Kill, you know how it is with magic. Exclusivity is just as important as faith, if everybody started to believe in it, it would become much less effective.”

“You could have just wiped their memory, why do you always—” he starts, feeling the bile rising at the back of his throat.

“Because,” Illumi says, and he’s close—closer than before, lowering his face to look at him in the eyes, one hand pressed on Killua's head. His long fingers feel like freezing ripples of something slimy pouring right inside Killua’s brain. “They don’t matter, these people.” Now he’s definitely talking about the whole of one hundred and twenty passengers that were on this flight, and whoever is still inside the airport and the medics, and the firefighters and everybody who isn’t a family member—a family member he considers as such. “They don’t matter at all. The faster you understand this, the sooner you’ll start really growing as a sorcerer. It’s important, Kill, it’s what our father wants for you and you know that he only wants the best.”

Killua isn’t going to cry. His eyes are dry—he feels dry, dried out. He swallows.

“Right,” he says. He swallows again, and shakes his head free. “Let’s go get Alluka, then.”

Illumi scoffs, like that too is Killua throwing a fit.

He doesn’t and he hates himself for it—for every single thing he doesn’t do. He follows Illumi’s tall, lanky gait toward the plane. It’s landed on its side, crushing one of the wings under its own weight.

Illumi lifts one finger at the first journalist who notices them; her eyes go blank all of the sudden and so do those of any other people inside Illumi’s spell range, like a blanket has suddenly appeared to stifle all the commotion to a quiet, silent daze. He shoos everybody away like they were persistent flies, and everybody climbs back inside their vehicles, water pumps and cameras, microphones and tools forgotten on the ground.

At least he doesn’t kill them; Killua is pretty sure it’s because a killing spree would have attracted even more unwanted attention at this point.

The plane is broken in a busted shell, open on the side and bent in the middle. The inside smells of blood and burnt plastic, of molten metal and oil. Killua brushes aside the oxygen masks hanging from above as Illumi inspects around with eyes as blank as the ones of the people he manipulates.

“Shouldn’t it be inside the cargo hold?”

Illumi doesn’t turn, he shakes his head.

“If it was that simple, I would have taken it easily even before the plane took off. But the person who was carrying it is quite smart. He managed to mislead me… I would have been irritated if this wasn’t family business.”

Killua snorts, hollow, and Illumi turns to deadpan at him.

“Nothing. Just. Everything is family business for you—and you were irritated, otherwise you wouldn’t have done all this.”

Illumi studies his surrounding like walking in the middle of a catastrophe of his own making doesn’t really ring any bells.

“I guess you might be right. I was irritated… at you, mostly. Father asked me to retrieve the teapot, but our mother was understandably worried about your wellbeing, running away like that. You put me in quite the uncomfortable position, Kill.”

Killua is pretty sure he isn’t expecting an apology, but the way he says it—it’s like crawling spiders down his throat. He tries to swallow, only for Illumi’s hand to close once again on his shoulder, his voice a genial hum.

“Don’t worry about it, little brother. You’ll have a lot of time to make it up to me once we get home. After all, you have days of work and training to catch up on.”

It’s exactly then that Killua sees it. It’s just a glimpse, brown wrap and a scribble, half hanging from the dented upper compartments right above Illumi’s bent shoulder. He straightens himself up and it’s gone but Killua can’t unseen now, the impossibly intact packet abandoned beside the burnt remains of a rucksack, untouched like it just happened to pop up in the middle of that air crash by chance.

There’s only one way out and the package is _so close_ —but Illumi will never be so easily distracted.

Struck, maybe.

Killua’s eyes shift toward the cable and circuits of the plane, still fizzing in the silence Illumi managed to create after willing every single person out of their way. It’s a constant, low buzzing, prickling at his ears. Illumi is talking again, probably waxing poetic about how sorcer-ness is such a fantastic way of life and how Killua is destined for grandeur.

Killua breathes, feeling the static in the air.

The residual electricity sparks fast from his feet, it crinkles up his limbs and strikes him hard, exhilarating as the lightning bolt flies up the sky scorching everything in its wake and pushing Illumi away, blinding him as Killua jumps forward, wind at his back to grab the package and run.

He’s already out, the lightning still discharging all its energy from the ground and up above towards the clouds, when Killua sees it. Something crouched right outside the carcass of the plane, small and green and _spiky_ , the arm that’s not in the cast pressed to cover his face at the sudden light of his magic.

Killua stumbles on his own feet, lands on one knee, and the package rolls on the concrete with a soft sound. He doesn’t reach for it.

“Gon,” he says instead, choked.

He’s still covering his face but he doesn’t look fried alive, which is impressive in itself. He blinks and Killua can read recognition in his eyes.

“Killua!”

The arm that was isn't grabbing at the package anymore, Killua uses it to smack Gon hard on the head.

He whines.

“Why are you here!” Killua yells, at his betrayed expression. “You shouldn’t be here, you—”

“Kill.”

It isn’t even a question or a call. It sounds like a spell and sends rivulets of freezing, slimy shudders along Killua’s spine.

He doesn’t need to turn to picture him, Illumi stepping out of the plane like nothing, hair not even frizzy despite the static still lingering around. Or maybe it’s Killua’s fear: it’s starting to buzz inside his head again, clouding his mind, begging him to just _let go_ —just nod and say he’s sorry, get back to Illumi, tail between his legs, ready to accept whatever punishment just so that he can _stop worrying._

Usually you need visual contact to cast a manipulation spell, but Killua has always been an exception to every rule when it comes to Illumi. He isn’t even sure his brother actually needs to use a spell to bend him to his will, at this point.

“Kill,” he repeats, and the word stings like needles. Killua tries to stay focused: focused on Gon’s giant, confused eyes, on the package. He’s got the package. He’s got _leverage_.

“I’m not coming with you,” he tells him, turning around to put himself in between Illumi and his most precious possessions. “We’re going away. You’re going to leave us alone.”

“You and the green boy?” Illumi asks, and he isn’t as unscathed as Killua thought at first. His clothes are burned at the edges, skin scorched in splotches on his exposed arms. On his face, though, his expression didn’t change one bit.

“What?” Gon says, and he’s trying to stand up, pushing himself with his good arm.

“Me and Alluka, Illumi." Killua might zap everyone again just to let out some steam. “We aren’t going to bother the family, we don’t want to have anything to do with the family, so just—”

Illumi doesn’t even shake his head.

“That’s unacceptable. Now, give that thing to me.”

Killua is ready to grab onto it for dear life. It’s Illumi’s face that stops him in his tracks, because Gon has picked up the package from the gorund, brows furrowed.

“G. Freecs.” He reads the discolored letters aloud. “That’s my name. Or is it Ging’s name?”

“You are Ging Freecs?” Illumi asks, and there’s genuine confusion on his face.

“I’m Gon,” Gon says, and he’s already tearing up the paper. Killua looks at the yellow dots smiling on the polished red surface of the teapot and his brain short-circuits trying to come up with something, anything at all—

The spell lifts him up with a blast, his shoes detach from the ground as he spins away, back bouncing down, ribs bruising and libs sprawled. He manages to slow down the fall, elbows scraping on the concrete, but it’s already too late: Illumi has lifted his hand again and Killua has rarely seen him employ actual offensive magic like that. He shouldn’t, because they can’t break the teapot, but he will because he’s reckless and violent, he’s always been, and Killua can’t do anything—he doesn’t have any power over him, it’s just how things are.

When Illumi’s hand lowers over Gon, the only thing Killua can do is scream.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear i did try to edit this thing into a less chaotic shape. Sadly, I failed XD

Gon has never met him, Ging.

Everybody always says that he's an awesome guy—not as in ‘good’, just awesome.

Aunt Mito doesn’t like him, because she used to like him a lot and then he just left her behind to go pursue adventures; Abe is fond of him, but with the same degree she’s fond of her plants or the mangy cats she feeds.

Kite is the closest one. Kite who is serious and cool, who gets talkative when you convince him to drink a bit and then all kinds of stories come up; stories of mummies and curses, of deities with lots of limbs and spells that can solve even the most desperate of circumstances.

The creature that came out of the pot doesn’t look like it could solve anything.

“Aye,” it says. She's a little girl, long dark hair flowing with static; eyes black and hollow on a face as pale as the moon. She’s floating for an entire, deep second until she’s down on the ground. Her movements are stiff like those of a doll, and her flowy dress sure makes her look like one.

“Killua!” Her voice is high pitched, smile creeping up her face. “Killua, Killua, Killua!”

Killua walks like he’s approaching a fast-growing fire.

“Nanika. I’m happy to see you.” 

“Killua, Killua, Killua,” the creature chants. She looks ready to bolt toward Killua. She doesn’t move, though, feet stuck on the ground, waiting for something. Something from Gon.

He doesn’t understand. Nothing makes sense and Kite is still—

“Who are you?” he asks, anger starting to build up. No one explained anything to him. Killua didn’t explain anything to him and—Killua tried to stop him from meddling with it, but Gon wanted to anyway and now Kite is hurt and it’s Illumi’s fault, but most of all it’s Gon’s fault. It’s Gon’s own fault, it must be.

Illumi hasn't move, still standing, face blank.

“This is inconvenient. Once activated, it’s impossible to stop. I’ll have to kill him.”

“If you kill him, the teapot will vanish again, you know that.”

Illumi doesn’t even bother to look in Killua's direction, eyes dull as he sizes Gon and the ghost-girl as if they were two pieces of a very annoying puzzle.

“If the owner dies, the wishes reset. Maybe the effect of Milluki’s foolish requests will be reset too and this time it will be easier to locate. Give it to me.” He's talking to Gon, hand extended. “Come on, so Kill and I can go back home.”

“I won’t come with you.” Killua’s voice is stretched over the tinnitus that started to grow inside Gon’s head.

“Give me that teapot, kid,” Illumi repeats.

“Gon, don’t! You have to make a w—”

Illumi doesn’t even do anything: he just glances at him and Killua is already down, kneeling and coughing like he’s drowning.

Nanika yelps but doesn't move; she looks awfully on the verge of tears for a ghastly entity that came out of a teapot.

“Quiet, Kill. I’m not talking to you now. Give me the teapot, G. Freecs.”

Gon’s brain isn’t working properly. It’s blinding him with flashes of red and white; he acknowledges the soft thump as the teapot falling on the ground while he stands up.

“I don’t care.” He hears himself saying it, somewhere around the bubble of suffocating stillness that’s buzzing inside his head. This person, this—whatever, it’s his fault if Kite is hurt, so Gon is going to—

Illumi’s eyes flash with something feral, lips parted, and Gon understands to some extent that he must have tried some kind of spell—a curse, and hex, whatever—but it just isn’t working on him. It bounces back, even the usual magic-smell it’s nothing more than a lingering cloud, it can’t touch him.

Gon's head is pulsing, he wants to _hurt_ , he's ready—until the pain comes suddenly from behind. A hit, cutting him clean from consciousness as fast as he touches the ground, falling.

Killua's shoes are the last thing he sees.

*

Gon smells rain and ozone and when he opens his eyes there’s a cloud floating right in front of his face.

He tries to breathe in, but there’s a weight on his chest. Someone put his casted arm up so that it didn’t fall from the couch. The couch itself it’s pretty soft and for a long second Gon feels inclined to just sink further and get back to sleep.

“Kite!” he yelps and the world spins around—his head spins, and he has to grab at the cushions to keep himself steady. A dull pain slides from his neck, but he can’t remember—

There's a storm inside Killua's eyes.

“I had to stop you, Gon. He would have killed you.”

Gon’s plaster cast slides on the side. It’s heavy, and it doesn’t matter at all.

“Killua! You’re okay, I’m so happy… What—”

“Apparently Paladin Necklace works.”

Gon startles, but it’s just Razor, big and bulky in what must be his pajamas. He’s wearing a pair of flip-flops and carrying cups of steaming tea.

Gon accepts one with his good hand, while Killua blatantly ignores the gesture; Razor leaves the mug on the coffee table, since Killua is sitting on top of it.

Gon’s head needs to seriously stop spinning.

“Paladin Necklace?” It's one of Greed Island cards—‘protects the user from offensive spells’, that’s what the caption says.

“Paladin Necklace,” Razor repeats, but he’s pointing at Satotz’s necklace, still hanging from Gon’s neck. “Greed Island cards are based on real-life artifacts and spells. Ging finds it incredibly funny, of course.”

“You’re still insisting that he isn’t a sorcerer,” Killua says, bitter and distrustful. He ends up bickering with Razor, even if Razor is actually just explaining that Ging is, in fact, just as human as him, even if sure as hell is a peculiar one.

Killua is radiating disbelief.

“This doesn’t make any sense… Unless he wished,” he adds, mumbling to himself.

“Wishes,” Gon says. He’s still trying to focus, earbuds buzzing. Killua really went and knocked him down like that? “What happened? Killua,” he adds, because he was already withdrawing and Gon doesn’t have time for that. Kite doesn’t have time for that. “How did I find you—no, what about the thing that came out of the pot?”

“It’s not a thing,” Killua lashes out, like a wild cat. The lamp above their heads starts flickering on and off. “She’s… Well, she has a name and I know that she looks scary, but she’s just—”

“She can grant wishes, right? That’s what she does.”

Killua’s lips are a thin line. He throws a glance toward Razor like he’s expecting to be jumped. Razor sighs a bit and says something about going to go double-check the wards ‘just in case’—in case of what, Gon doesn’t ask. He looks straight into Killua’s eyes instead.

“She can do anything, right? Anything you wish?”

Something on Killua’s face shifts, it’s small and scared and tired. But maybe something is written on Gon's face too, because the answer isn’t as vague as usual.

“As far as I know, she can grant any wish with very little exception.”

Gon breathes. She can grant any wish.

“Would she heal someone who’s been in an accident?”

Killua blinks then, and his expression shifts from anguish to utter _relief_.

“Yes. Those are… Those are her favorite."

Gon's stomach roars, and when he recognizes it as relief too he’s already crashed on top of Killua, to squeeze him in a hug.

“That’s perfect! Kite will be fine for sure, then!”

“Yeah, it’s… Gon, wait.” Killua puts some distance between them. They’re sitting on the same carpet where they played Greed Island just a couple of days ago. “The teapot, I don’t have it anymore. I couldn’t take both, I had to—I knocked you down and apparated at random. I had to leave it there.”

“Yeah, then we’ll have to go get it back!”

Killua deadpans so hard and fast that Gon has to pinch his arm. The blue of his eyes sparks lightnings.

“You don’t have to do anything. You don’t get it, right? If Mustache Guy didn’t give you that weird enchanted necklace, Illumi would have killed you at least three different times!”

Like Gon gives a damn about stupid Illumi. Killua just doesn’t get it.

“But we need to get the teapot back, right? And you can’t do that alone!”

Killua cuts him off.

“Only the person who opened the teapot can whish. There are three wishes in total and Nanika can be… You have to be careful when you tell her what you want, because sometimes she messes things up. She’s a kid, she gets confused.”

He seems worried, in a different way than just scared about Illumi.

“You know her well,” Gon says.

“I guess. I mean, she’s been in my family for basically all my life, but… That’s why they used to keep her away, because she can mess up easily, even if she never wants to hurt anybody. Usually it’s the ones who make the wishes that ask for wicked things.” He’s brooding, brow scrunched. “I don’t know what Illumi wants, but he might try to make you ask for his own wishes. He can do it easily, he’s good at manipulating people. I’m not sure your magical necklace can protect you, he just needs a drop of your blood and we’re doomed.”

Gon nods, serious.

“He’s not going to get it. I’m going to punch him if he tries.”

“You what?”

“Punch him, Killua. I’m going to punch him.”

They look at each other for a long second, probably for different reasons; Gon’s mind is clear, though, and he’ll make Killua understand.

“He hurt Kite,” he says, dead serious. “And he hurt you too, right? I don’t like him.” It’s that simple, really. Of course Illumi is supposed to be this powerful sorcerer but, well, Gon has another powerful sorcerer on his side, so what’s the problem?

Killua is powerful, he's just too anxious to admit it.

“The weather,” he starts, frowning. The air is humid and still, now, it’s a perfect summer night outside the big windows of Razor’s place. Gon can still smell that lingering ozone that seems to be Killua’s own smell. “The things you can do with the weather, can Illumi do that too?”

Killua blinks, caught off guard like he never really thought about it.

“Not really. I mean, it’s elemental magic, you need to be born with it, it’s… a family thing, from my father lineage, but I’m the only one who got it among my siblings.”

Gon nods, finger tapping on his cast.

“Elemental magic,” he repeats, mumbling. “Well, it’s powerful, isn’t it? I bet you could beat Illumi no problem with that.”

Killua—scoffs, fast and harsh.

“No way!” He manages to get even more distance between them, like he’s scared that Gon is going to infect him with his absurd ideas. “It’s too erratic and powerful. I shouldn’t even… I mean, it’s too dangerous. Silly stuff like the ones I did with you is easy, but I can’t control it properly and I—”

“Then don’t,” Gon says, simple as that. “Don’t control it, just let it do whatever.”

Killua looks at him, openly scared, but Gon is happy. Gon has a plan.

*

Illumi’s magic creeps up the street like something viscous. Gon understands why Killua is scared—he gets it in a primal way, he's a tiny animal in front of a predator. 

He can smell the blood on the crows that come flapping about in the night, like crows definitely shouldn’t. They fly in a circle, close to the roof, and Gon retreats a bit further from the railing.

Killua is still sitting there, eyebrows scrunched as the wind picks up its pace all around. Gon shoos one crow away with a hand; he meets eyes with the bird and somehow that’s all he needs to instantly know that Illumi wouldn’t mind killing him off on the spot if he decided that Gon was slightly inconvenient—worse, if he decided that killing him wouldn’t inconvenience him too much.

Gon still hasn’t exactly understood what’s going on. Why on earth is Illumi so mean—but family can be a messy thing sometimes. Gon has Mito and Abe and he’s never properly had Ging, but Ging is the reason he has Kite and he’s also the reason why he met Killua and Gon likes Killua a lot. And if Illumi is mean to Killua, then Gon is going to do his best to punch him. That’s pretty linear—he likes it when things are that clear.

“What the hell are you smiling about?” Killua asks him, one eye open. It’s just as grey as the clouds gathering on their heads.

Gon waves a gloved hand at him. He can’t keep still; the rubber boots Razors lent him are definitely too big and they squeak like crazy as Gon rocks on his heels.

“Don’t worry about it. How is it coming up?” He lifts his nose up toward the sky; it’s starting to look like the sea-bottom when the ocean gets rough and currents comb sand underwater, digging rifts and bumps.

Killua exhales worry. His hair bristles with static.

“If I end up conjuring some deadly hurricane and kill you and everybody else in this stupid town—”

“It won’t happen,” Gon tells him. “It’s going to be fine.”

Killua looks at him like he really wants to ask how on earth he could be so sure but the point is—Gon must be sure. That’s the only way. They need that teapot so that they can go help Kite: that’s the only possible outcome and any other possibility just doesn’t exist.

“And you’re absolutely sure that stupid necklace is going to—”

“I’m sure, Killua, don’t worry.”

Killua is going to worry anyway; at this point Gon can’t even guess if the frown on his face is there because of the strain of conjuring such a big storm or because he’s actually just a big worry-pants. It’s almost endearing, really.

The crows caw louder, flying in ample circles. They don’t even smell like crows—but they do stink of metal. Of iron and rust.

“He’s down the street,” Killua says, even if his eyes are still closed.

Gon leans out of the roof. Black birds are flying from every direction under clouds as dense and delicate as blown glass; then they gather down on the sidewalk, but instead of crushing on each other they melt in a black puddle. Illumi emerges from it like that’s just how he usually steps inside people’s houses, uninvited.

“With such a big storm, you might as well just sent me an invitation with your address on, Kill." Despite being down on the sidewalk, his voice resounds right inside Gon’s head, as if it was whispered to his ear.

Killua doesn't move. He’s still gathering clouds, teeth gritted and sweat collecting on his temples.

“You’re sure—”

“Razor’s strong,” Gon says. He tries to wipe off his mind the thousands of different images of Kite as a broken, burnt corpse inside an air-crash. Nothing bad will happen to Razor—nothing bad can happen to Razor.

Illumi stops in front of the building; he must have sensed the magical wards around the shop. Gon didn’t ask if Ging put them there, but he always thought that Razor’s place smelled a bit like home, and Satotz’s shop too. 

Whatever it is, it prevents Illumi from crow-teleporting on their necks. He lingers in front of the door instead; Gon can see the red of the teapot on the hand he isn’t using to knock.

Killua snorts. He sounds slightly hysterical.

“Did he knock like a fucking boy-scout.”

“I think he did. Twice.”

Then a loud bang comes together with the first thunder, and the whole building shakes.

“Wards are always less effective on the front door.” Killua growls it as if that’s supposed to be common knowledge. The wind starts howling.

Gon is almost—he doesn’t rush downstairs to help Razor. If Razor said that he would have bought time, then he must trust him. Half a minute of crashing sounds and thuds feels like an eternity before it becomes silence and stretches in another couple eons between Gon's pupils and the roof's door.

It squeaks softly on its hinges while it opens up slowly despite the gusts of wind.

“Really, Kill.” Illumi too smells of iron, like he’s been soaked in blood, even if Gon can’t see any on him. Maybe Razor is okay—he doesn’t even try to ask: Illumi is blatantly ignoring him, teapot still in hand—Killua said it was leverage, but if someone close to Killua lives inside it, isn't this a hostage situation?

Illumi looks at Killua, face impassive, and sighs. 

“What are you even trying to do? This kind of parlor tricks you like so much are just as useless as they’re flashy.”

Killua is so tense that Gon thinks maybe he's going to just flee or teleport himself out. He gnashes his teeth instead.

“Just give Alluka back, Illumi."

Maybe Illumi just doesn't need to blink.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s your plan, Kill? You know you aren’t strong enough to beat me, and I know you aren’t stupid enough to try.”

“I’ll beat you,” Gon says, the rubber of his glove squeezed inside his fist. 

Illumi tilts his head, hair flowing, but before he says anything, blinding lightning flares over their heads. It’s still not raining yet, all energy pent up in growing, bulging grey.

Gon searches for the blue of Killua’s irises; their eyes meet and that’s the cue: Gon shuts his own closed; he grits his teeth and covers his ears as the world outside his eyelids explodes in a flash and shrieks like a gigantic flock of starlings under the soles of his rubber boots, to discharge down on the ground.

Whatever Illumi says—whatever counter spell he tries to cast to protect himself from the electricity—Gon has already jumped, to punch him in the face with his squeaking gloved fist. Electric current fizzles and burns but it really doesn’t hurt him, while Illumi kneels on the ground, skin burnt and hair frizzy. The teapot falls down hard but doesn’t break; it spins and rolls on the roof.

Gon intercepts it with his arm, but he ends up knocking it away with his plaster cast. The impact of his already broken elbow on the ground vibrates inside his skull and he’s pretty sure someone screamed—

“Nanika,” he says, to the growing shadow that’s spilling out the teapot as the lid rolls away, to fall in a clatter near Illumi’s knees.

Nanika smiles at him from above, hollow eyes curios on her tilted face.

“Aye.”

Gon grins, still half-sprawled on the ground.

“Make Illumi go away and never come back. I want him to stop bothering you and Killua forever, okay?”

“Gon—” Killua starts, and rage doesn’t even reach Illumi’s eyes—they’ve vanished already with the rest of him, the stench of blood, the crows.

Nanika smiles, humming to herself as the thunders insist on drumming above.

“Been good?” she asks, as Gon tries to stand up, arm still shaking. He smiles too.

“You’ve been super good. Thank you!”

Another lightning discharges on the ground and the light goes out on the whole block, as alarms start howling simultaneously.

The rain begins to fall in heavy splotches. Killua is drenched, eyes big.

“He’s gone,” Gon says, grinning at him. “He’s gone, Killua, it worked!”

“Gon,” Killua says, and he’s growling.

“What?”

“You used two wishes.”

Gon blinks away the water that’s gathering on his face.

“What?”

“You—moron. You used two wishes!”

“Oh,” Gon says, and he’s looking at Nanika.

“Aye,” she says, diligent. The water doesn't seem to affect her at all.

The metal door creaks and Razor’s head pops out, one rivulet of blood coming from his temple, but overall looking just like someone who’s been woken up suddenly and feeling a bit grumpy because of it.

He looks at Gon and Killua, drenched to the bones; he lifts his gaze at the growing thunders on their heads, and at Nanika, who’s still smiling her hollow smile.

“Well,” he says. “You sure know how to stage family drama, don’t you?”

Killua’s laugh sounds a bit like a sob, then.

*

Razor insists he’s fine. Killua is still looking at him like he’s some kind of zombie.

“But why didn’t he kill you? He always does,” he says, like his brother’s habits puzzle him.

Razor hands him another Space Invaders towel, since Killua failed to use the first one to actually dry himself and chose to put it on Nanika’s head instead. She didn’t go back inside the pot and Gon is quite wary of talking to her because he doesn’t want to screw up again—he really needs that wish for Kite, really.

“I’m a human, but that doesn’t mean I’m helpless,” Razor says, as if he knew exactly what was going on inside Killua’s mind. “You should have understood it by now.” Gon knows he’s pointing at him, but he’s too concentrated on Kite to try and follow the discussion. He throws the damp towel away.

“Can I just ask, Killua? Can I just ask her to heal Kite? He’s at the hospital now, he was on the plane Illumi attacked.”

Killua doesn’t answer. He’s smart, he probably knew already. He looks at Gon and then at Nanika.

He’s petting her hair as if she was a way smaller kid—like she’s something precious.

“Nanika is really good at healing, but she needs to touch the person, otherwise it won’t work.”

“Let’s go then!”

“I’ll drive you there,” Razor says. He looks positively unfazed for someone who's experienced a close call with death by magical means. Gon too feels pretty unfazed—Kite is a giant spider nested inside his brain, threading his thoughts always in the same direction.

They step outside, Gon’s boots squeaking on the sidewalk, and they’re met with pitch-black darkness.

“See? You just had to give into it,” Razor says, as they wait at a useless traffic light battered by the wind, all block out of light—probably the whole city is on a blackout. Killua’s storm is still raging on their heads; it’s a whole supercell, rumbling with thunder. Hammering rain is slapping Razor’s old pick-up from every direction and Gon can’t stop bouncing on the seat. He climbs to stick his head between the front seats.

“How far is it?”

Razor insisted that everybody rode on the back because “none of you look a day older than twelve.” Aunt Mito called another five times and he was probably feeling guilty and responsible. Gon can’t wait to see her and tell her that they can heal Kite.

“We should have teleported there,” he says, looking at Killua.

“It’s called apparate. And I don’t think I’d be able, it’s…” His breath comes out shaky as he looks at the rain gathers on the window in big, ball-shaped drops. “I don’t really have any residual ounce of magic in me, right now, to be honest. I’m sorry,” he adds, and his voice quivers a bit. Maybe it’s exhaustion, maybe it’s something else entirely. “I really didn’t want to involve anyone in this thing.”

Gon blinks.

“But it’s okay. It’s not your fault and, anyway, Nanika is going to heal Kite, so everything is fine, really.” But he still can’t sit still. He must be shaking with anticipation way more than cold, despite the fact that his hair is still pretty wet. Razor throws a glance at the rearview mirror and turns up the heat.

Gon presses his temple onto the back of the front seat, the only hand available still placed on top of the teapot.

Nanika is sitting between him and Killua, looking creepy and a bit giggly too. Killua is holding her hand, he had since the first step they took out of the door.

Gon’s mind is buzzing.

“Say, Killua. Why were you searching for the teapot? I mean,” he adds, because Killua looks puzzled. “Because if Kite had it, it means that you didn’t have it in the first place, so you didn’t lose it.”

Killua blinks.

“Yeah, it’s… It’s a long story, really,” he answers; he looks wary, even if Razor is searching for radio channels now—nothing works, the storm must have cut even those out. “And, anyway, you shouldn’t worry about it. It’s just fair, let’s go heal Kite.”

“You wanted a wish for yourself, right?” Gon says, because that’s the only thing that makes sense. “And I blew everything up yelling against Illumi!”

Killua shakes his head.

“You didn’t. You saved us, me and…” He stops and looks at Nanika. “There’s another person who lives inside the teapot and can never come out. Her name is Alluka. I wanted to free her,” he says, and Nanika isn’t smiling anymore. “But that’s fine, I’ll find the teapot again after your wish and this time I’m going to get her back.”

“Find?”

“The teapot vanishes after the wishes are fulfilled. The more difficult the wishes, the more difficult will be to find the teapot after, but usually people use it for fucked up stuff. This time you asked for selfless reasons, I’m sure that somehow it’s going to be fine.”

Gon’s mind boggles but then the hospital comes in sight, big and bluish against a sky made of molten metal, storm raging on the trees that surround the parking lot.

“It’s just—it’s Kite,” Gon says, and Killua’s eyes don’t hate him at all. “I can’t—it’s _Kite_.”

Killua puts a hand on Nanika’s head. She hums, blissful.

“I know, I get that. It’s fine.”

Razor stops in front of the entrance and Gon expels himself out of the car, holding the teapot close to his chest. Killua comes after, picking Nanika up like a child.

“Better if she…” He gestures vaguely at the pot as Razor’s truck splashes water to their calves.

Nanika’s eyes wobble, ready to cry. She whines, clinging onto Killua and he pats her on the head.

“Sorry, it’s just for a bit. I—Gon’s going to call you out in a moment, okay?”

“’Kay,” she says, miserable, and Gon feels honestly bad when she gets sucked inside the open teapot like a blur of colors, black hair swirling. Killua’s face is even worse, but it lasts less than a moment. “Don’t let her fall, okay?” he says, looking at the teapot.

Gon nods. They run toward the glass doors, Gon opens it with his shoulder.

“I’m going to help you find her, after Kite is healed.” It just makes sense, that’s what he's going to do. 

They’re once again all drenched, but Killua smiles as the water slides on his cheeks.

“Like I’d let you, moron,” he says, and he sounds cocky, a shadow of a smirk on his face.

“I don’t need your permission, I just will!”

Killua scoffs and frowns at his shoes.

“Let’s just be thankful that you got out of this thing with just one broken arm.”

Gon shrugs, it doesn’t even hurt anymore. He completely stopped thinking about it.

There’s a different kind of hurt in his chest when they stomp on the squeaky pavement of the corridors, more than one nurse yelling at them from behind; the power outage has hit the hospital too, everybody looks pretty freaked out, swarming around like hasty shadows under the flashes of the emergency lights.

Gon isn’t sure where he’s going—he couldn’t remember if Kite was in the ICU or in the ER, those are floating letters that don’t mean a thing inside his head and he just—

“Gon!”

His neck springs up, just right before he was thinking about running inside every single room of that building.

“Gon! Where the hell—I must have called you a thousand times! You—” It’s Aunt Mito, trotting down from the stairs, hair disheveled and face worried. She grabs at his shoulders and squeezes, breath uneven and eyes blazing with worry. “What are you doing with a teapot—No, what happened!” She’s looking at Killua too, who’s still there in plain sight, wet clothes clinging at him and hair plastered on his forehead.

“My phone fell,” Gon tells her. “Killua helped me come back here.”

It’s a big non-sequitur, evidently, but Aunt Mito is a pragmatic woman. She acts like Killua is just supposed to be there and smiles curtly at him, eyebrows still tilted but face open. She then breathes in and squats down to get at Gon’s height.

“Listen, Gon. It’s about Kite.” She places both hands on his shoulders, and Gon smiles because yeah—he's still holding the teapot to his chest.

“Yes, Aunt Mito!” he says, jumping on both feet. “Everything’s fine, I’ve a solution. Killua helped.”

Killua looks a lot like someone who would like to be everywhere but under the scrutiny of Aunt Mito.

She smiles again and swallows.

“Right, I’m sure it’s… Gon, you have to understand, things weren’t looking well.”

“Aunt Mito, just get me to him, okay? I promise I can heal him.”

Mito frowns. She looks at the teapot for real and then at Killua, for real, like she’s actually seeing him just then.

“You were the one who made the bedsheet fly,” she says.

Killua takes a step back like she’s accused him of murder.

“Maybe?” he answers, uncertain. “We really have a solution for this Kite person,” he adds, and somehow Killua sounds way more convincing than Gon, way more competent and Aunt Mito’s face cracks.

“Okay then,” she says, and stands up. “I don’t think I can—come with me, Gon, okay? You too… It’s Killua, right?”

He doesn’t know what he answers. Gon is already sprinting on the corridor.

“Come on, hurry!” he yells and really doesn’t get why Aunt Mito doesn’t seem to be in any hurry anymore.

*

There are words that Gon has heard many times. Sometimes, Abe tells him stories about their family; she told him about Mito’s parents, who died in car crash, and she told him about Ging’s dad—Gon’s grandfather—who died too, lost at sea back when they still used to live on Whale Island.

Those people, Gon has never known any of them and, despite being naturally curious, he never exactly dwelled on them either. He prefers hanging out with the livings, all things considered.

He never really connected the dots—that dead people have been alive once, just like everyone he knows, with their own life outside of Abe’s stories or Gon’s own imagination.

People that are alive one day and then they aren’t anymore. And how is that supposed to make sense? It doesn’t. It just doesn’t.

“But he was alive,” he says, looking at Mito, trying to explain. She doesn’t seem to get it, she’s still there, looking at him with eyes so serious and she doesn’t seem to get it. “They said he was alive, right?” He looks at the clock, there’s a clock on the nurse’s desk, right beside piles of paperwork and a vase full of buttercups. They all look the same shade of bluish under the neon lights from both sides of the corridor. The double doors that separate them from the ICU are closed and Kite is there—right there, he’s just a couple meters away and aunt Mito talks like he’s not. It doesn’t make sense.

“Yes, but then—his injuries were really bad, Gon,” Mito says, voice low like they have to be careful not to disturb people. There are a lot of people walking around. They must be doctors and the like—they run around like headless chickens or so it seems to Gon.

“Okay,” he says and still, even if his body is somewhat shaking, he doesn’t feel like crying or anything. “But you see, inside the teapot lives this—she’s called Nanika. And she can grant any wish you want. But to heal Kite she has to touch him, right? That’s what you said.”

He’s talking to Killua, now. He’s still there; he too looks the same shade of pale bluish as the buttercups. He’s near the wall, like he needs a conscious effort to keep standing straight.

“Yes,” Killua says, but he too has such a weird expression. “She can just heal, though. She can’t revive people. That’s just… No one can.”

“But she can heal Kite,” Gon insists, and he’s starting to get irritated. It’s like everybody is trying to be difficult—Kite’s just right there, a couple doors and a corridor. “You said she would heal him.”

“Because I thought he was still alive. But if he isn’t…”

Gon feels an ugly churning inside his stomach, full of needles stinging at his diaphragm.

“But you told me—you told me she can grant any wishes. You want your wish back? I’m sorry I screwed up, I… I know it’s my fault if you don’t have your wish. But Kite—”

“It’s not about that.” Killua’s voice is somewhere around Gon’s head, because he finds out that he’s still looking at the door—he really can’t see anything else. “I—Nanika is powerful but not all-powerful. Death is—you can’t undo it. No one can.”

“But then—why?” Gon asks, and finds his nose pressed on aunt Mito’s neck, the teapot still solid between their bodies. “I just want to—why?”

Mito is soft, her hair ticklish on Gon’s nose as she hugs him tighter.

“Oh, well, this is what I’d call a gloomy atmosphere.”

Gon sniffs, Aunt Mito always smells good even in such a situation, inside this place that reeks of chemicals and worn out laundries, washed up a bit too many times.

The man on the other side of the corridor is quite short and he too has such a distinctive smell; something like dust and dirt, but also—something else entirely, something familiar.

Gon almost falls from the bench when Aunt Mito jumps up.

“You!” Aunt Mito yells, so loud that two passing doctors stop in their tracks. “You, pathetic, sad excuse of a human being!”

Gon blinks.

The man tilts his head, shifts his weight on worn-out boots and sighs.

“Long time no see, Mito,” he says, before placing his gaze somewhere around Gon's forehead.

Gon opens his mouth, mind blank.

“Ging,” he says.

“Yo, Gon,” Ging answers, and he’s looking anywhere—anywhere—but in his eyes. “You’ve grown up.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t know if anybody was expecting actual sound explanations, but in that case I have some bad news XDD

Mito is screaming. Kite is still dead. Gon has never felt so lost in his whole life.

He’d like to have a map, maybe draw one, just to… Ging is there, finger stuck inside one ear as Mito hammers his eardrums about what a deadbeat father he is and a worthless person and he really needed for Kite to die to maybe think of coming here? What does he want now, he’s useless now, he’s always been useless.

It’s nothing Gon hasn’t heard before. He looks at Ging’s weird turban and the way his spiky hair comes out of it in disheveled tufts. They’re as dark as Gon’s own and so are his eyes. 

They look so alike—Ging must be the person Gon looks most alike in the whole universe and still, he’s _Ging_ , not dad. He’s always been Ging, in Abe’s stories and Mito’s insults. That’s how Kite called him too—but now Ging is here and Kite is away, someplace Gon can’t reach—he can’t even begin to think about how he could reach it. 

He lifts his gaze and finds Killua, as white as the wall behind him. He’s picked up the teapot and he’s holding it with that same kind of fierce, delicate strength he used to grab Nanika’s hand. 

“He’s your dad, right?” he asks, brow furrowed.

“Yes. He’s Ging.”

Killua’s eyes narrow in suspicion as he sizes Ging up.

“He’s indeed a human, but not exactly. Something’s off about him.”

Gon’s stomach feels all upset, he tries to understand what Killua means but something is missing—Kite, Kite is missing. Is it going to be like that from now on? Kite is going to be gone forever, Gon’s going to miss him forever, that’s just…

Killua’s voice is low, and gentle.

“We could still try something? Like, maybe Nanika can, I don’t know, get back in time. That’s dangerous magic, but I’ve heard of it, so it should be theoretically possible—”

“Let’s maybe avoid actively trying to destroy the fabric of the universe, kids.”

Ging isn’t tall at all. He’s pretty small, actually; his hair makes up much of his height, but what he doesn’t have in stature he somehow manifests in a weird kind of energy; he radiates it in waves. It’s like his strange smell; maybe that’s what Killua meant—maybe that’s what magic is.

“You have a better idea?” Killua rebuts, and he’s suddenly growling. Ging sizes him up.

“Kite is dead,” Gon says. The words don’t make any sense inside his head but are enough for his eyes to just—start spilling, like a dam has been opened, and the world is quivering around, drumming at the same time with his heartbeat, trying to choke him.

He’s crying, like he’s never cried before, not that he can remember, and he can’t hear what Ging is saying or what Aunt Mito is saying above the frantic hug she envelops him in, squeezing hard with both arms. And Killua, still there with eyes so big and those too are full of tears, or so it seems—but maybe it’s just that Gon’s whole world is made of tears and they’re all going to drown. He’s going to drown everybody and it will be his fault.

“It’s my fault,” he tells, mostly to Ging, but to himself too and Killua and Nanika inside the teapot. “I didn’t think, I just thought that magic was fun, I didn’t want for Kite to get hurt, I’m so sorry—”

“Kite isn’t dead,” Ging says, as Gon sniffs. There’s a salty taste inside his mouth, a ringing in his ears.

“I don’t want him to be dead,” he tries, but Mito is already growling deep from her belly.

“Ging, I swear, you’re the one who’s going to be dead if you don’t—”

Ging lifts both hands up.

“I’m telling the truth… come on, Mito, you know I wouldn’t lie.”

“Of course you would! And I talked to the doctors. Kite is—”

“Kite isn’t dead,” Ging repeats, and this time he’s really looking at Gon. In the eyes. They’re just as brown as his, and weirdly familiar, and maybe a bit fond.

“He’s not so silly as to let himself be killed this stupidly… I mean, I’m sorry for the other victims of this tremendous tragedy,” he adds, because one nurse just froze him in place. He clears his throat, hands buried inside his pockets. “Come on, there’s nothing to do here anymore.”

“Where are we going?” Gon asks, confused and sad and still overwhelmingly desperate.

“To the only interesting place in this stupid city. Come on, kid, you too,” Ging says, and he’s talking to Killua. “Keep that teapot out of trouble, would you?”

*

They won’t need a wish. That’s what Ging said when Killua asked. Aunt Mito is silent, but she refused to remain in the hospital to take care of, apparently, Kite’s body.

“You won’t leave me behind, I’ve been in this damn place for hours before any of you decided it was time to show up. I was the one who—” She was the one who waited and the one who had to receive the Talk. She’s the first one to step out of the hospital and back in the rain.

The sky is still raging, rain whipping the parking lot from every side. 

Razor rolls down the window, acknowledge Ging with a curt nod and tell them to hop aboard.

They must look so weird, Ging’s turban, Gon walking around in giant rubber boots and a plaster cast, Killua with his white hair and his teapot—and Mito, too, feral as she claims the front seat and shuts the door way harder than necessary.

Razor drives like doing so in the midst of a storm is nothing new. Maybe it isn’t: Gon has heard a lot of pretty incredible stories from him too. Most of those were about Ging, so much that it’s surreal, having him there, banished on the backseat between Gon and Killua.

“So. You are a sorcerer,” Ging starts, fingers fidgeting. Killua looks at him like he’s a talking lamppost and Ging points above. “That’s pretty impressive elemental magic.”

Killua deadpans at him.

“Shouldn’t you be talking with your son?” he rebuts.

Ging clears his throat. Gon is still looking at him.

“Do I have something on my face?”

“No. I just thought we really look alike.”

“That’s natural. You’re my son.”

Aunt Mito doesn’t say anything, but her stony face inside the rearview mirror is enough of a catalyst for silence to fill the whole truck until Razor parks like a savage right in front of Satotz’s shop.

An uprooted kiosk rolls to the other side of the street in a din of metal, leaving wet newspapers in its trail, but Satotz’s place is still standing unharmed.

“It wasn’t on purpose,” Killua says, like they’re accusing him of something. “I mean, it was for the first five minutes, now it’s just out of control.”

Damage to public and private property aside, Gon still thinks that the storm itself is pretty, as is Killua despite looking like someone who really needs to sleep. Gon too definitely feels like sleeping.

Mister Satotz must have been doing exactly that, because the door opens up on his classic-looking pajama with ducklings.

“How can I be of assistance?” he asks, and the cheer in his voice is louder than the wind. He does gape when his eyes stop on Ging, though. 

“Long time no see,” Ging greets him. Mito crushes one of his feet as she marches inside.

“That’s all you can say, right? What a waste…”

Gon follows her, kicking off Razor’s boots as fast as he’s inside; he knows the adults are talking around his head, but he just can’t concentrate on anything. He finds Killua, still standing in front of the door, trying to take up as little space as possible.

“I can dry that for you,” he says, when he too meets Gon’s eyes. He’s talking about his plaster cast and Gon—Satotz has offered to make tea. Everybody seems bent on wasting as much time as possible and Gon is going to lose it.

The whole room is pulsing—no, that’s Gon’s head. His socks are drenched and clenching on his feet as he paces around, unable to stay still.

“We don’t have time for tea! We have to—what do we have to do, Ging?”

He stops mid-sentence—whatever he was saying, he sighs when Gon looks at him dead in the eyes. “Nothing—I’m serious. If it worked, it has worked already.”

Gon doesn’t wait to understand—there’s nothing to understand there, if Ging says it’s like that, then it must be; he’s the first one to jump behind Satotz’s heels as he retrieves the vault’s keys from the drawer behind his desk.

Satotz and Ging are still insisting on making small talk, but Gon can’t exactly get mad over it, not when Killua and Mito are already looking at the both of them with such violent intent that it’s a miracle their heads don’t fall off on the spot.

Then the door squeaks on its hinges, heavy and old. It still smells of dust and magic, whatever that means. There, Gon realizes, is where he smelled Ging’s smell; and back at home, and on Whale Island too.

Mister Satotz strokes his mustache.

“It should be under ‘c’, I think for cradle maybe?”

“Well, that’s how people referred to it back in East Gorteau, but Kite and I called it slot too, because apparently it works a bit like a slot machine too. Or egg, since it’s fairly egg shaped? Let’s see.” Ging marches in the maze of bookcases like he’s got a mental map ready.

Gon jogs along, trying to look at his face.

“You come here often?”

Ging just hums, noncommittal.

“I mean, I used to, but not that much anymore. At least, not in the last two or three years.”

“So before we moved here.”

“If I knew he was in town, I would have killed him,” Mito adds, just to clarify. Gon can easily depict how that would have played out—tragically, and with loads of blood.

“Maybe it’s under ‘b’ for box… We put it inside a box for sure.”

“What about ‘crib’? But it would have also been in ‘c’.”

Gon’s head bounces from Mister Satotz to Ging, so fast that his neck creaks, until Killua plants a hand on his shoulder and steps forward. He’s goggling at them like they’re basically mad crazy.

“Isn’t all this extraordinarily random and unorganized? What do you need, I can locate it.”

“Oh no,” Ging says. “None of the items I retrieve can be located with a spell. It was actually one of the wishes I asked for the first time I found that teapot.”

Killua eyes narrow in very angry slits. Maybe he's really going to jinx off some heads.

“What the fuck, why would you do something like that?”

“Because I handle dangerous stuff, kid. It’s safer this way,” Ging rebuts. They exchange the most bewildered expressions Gon has ever witnessed.

“And who the hell gave you the fucking right to be the judge for that? You store magical artifacts inside a darn vault like a madman, you stink of magic that isn’t yours and—”

“Yeah, well, no one gave me any rights, I just took them for myself,” Ging tells him, and he looks genuinely unfazed by the accusation. “But it’s not like magic is fair in the first place, otherwise everybody could do it, don’t you think?”

Killua looks honestly taken aback by that, and he turns toward Gon, but then—Gon hears it, soft and squealing and far away. He cups his ears and asks for silence, even if that earns him one very sharp look from Aunt Mito.

“Don’t you hear it? It’s...” A cry? He breathes, mind zeroing on just that sound. “Something is crying in this direction.”

“Well, isn’t this getting creepier by the minute,” Mito says, but Gon is already sprinted forward, forgetting even Ging all together. There’s something—no, someone is crying in between the bookcases. It’s a high pitched sound, like the squeal of a puppy, coming from the top shelf, from the weird green box. He can’t get there just by jumping, he’ll need—

“Wait,” Killua taps on his shoulder, like he wants to shove him away, but then Gon’s feet stop touching the ground and he’s flying, just like that. His shadow pools down under his socks as he holds his breath.

“Mind the ceiling,” Killua recommends, as Gon rises up taller than him. Ging whistles his approval and Mito just downright sits down on the nearest stepladder asking aloud why on earth didn’t they just use the stepladder in the first place.

Gon’s hair brushes the ceiling; he extends both hands to grab at the box and yes, the sound is definitely coming from there. Something is rustling inside.

Gon tries to push himself down from the ceiling, then, but Killua has already jumped to grab at his foot as he flows like a helium balloon.

When Gon’s socks are once again on the floor, Killua’s nose is incredibly close.

“We should do it again one of these days,” Gon says, feeling kinda dreaming.

Mito says “over my dead body” and the box squeals harder.

“Put it down, be careful,” Ging tells him, but Gon was being careful already—he knows how to deal with small animals. 

He opens the box, quietly and the thing inside it doesn’t look like a cradle at all. More like a big egg, crudely shaped from something that seems wood but not exactly—it’s shinier and smoother, definitely not natural.

The enthusiasm on Ging’s face looks like the same Gon feels over interesting bugs. 

“This is a very interesting thing Kite found,” he explains, over the crying that’s still going strong inside the egg. It feels warm under Gon’s hands. “They say that, if you come very close to death, it will provide you with another body.”

Killua scoffs, arms crossed.

“Bullshit. Necromancy is bullshit. Everybody knows it.”

“Yes,” Ging says. “But I don't think it’s quite necromancy yet. Just borderline, and magic is a matter of subtleties most of the time.”

The cry goes on, it wobbles inside Gon’s head too.

“So it’s…is Kite inside the egg?” He isn’t sure—Ging scratches at his turban.

“Since he was technically the owner of the object, he should be. But the thing is also said to, you know, chose a random body as a vessel, so it could be anything really. Let’s hope it isn’t a cockroach.”

Gon swallows hard, and feels his lips tremble.

“Kite could be a cockroach?”

“Don’t cry—I’m sure he’s not! No cockroach could make this sound, maybe he’s, like, a groundhog? Those can sure cry a lot.”

Gon sniffs harder.

“I don’t want Kite to be a groundhog.”

Ging nods, eyebrows scrunched.

“Yes, that would be inconvenient. But interesting nonetheless.”

“You’re enjoying this a bit too much,” Mito says, from the background.

“Whatever it is,” Killua interrupts them, one hand on Gon’s shoulder, “if he really isn’t dead, we could just ask Nanika to give him his body back.”

Ging blinks, like he didn’t really think about that. Gon is just—he can’t, but Killua is serious. He shrugs like it’s no big deal.

“That would only be fair since it’s Illumi’s fault.”

Gon looks at his pale face, the way his hair is still wet and sticking in every direction and he feels a sudden, burning need to just hug him. He’s sure Killua would smell of clouds and magic and everything would finally be alright. 

Ging's face pops up in the middle, eyes fixed to the box, like he’s expecting to unwrap a present.

“Shut your mouths now, kids. It’s hatching.”

Gon has seen eggs hatch before, usually of reptiles, but birds too, up on the highest branches of the trees he used to climb when he was on Whale Island. It’s such a known event and still, so alien there under the ceiling of that dusty old room, with Ging’s face right in front of his as he spies from above, eyes gleaming with curiosity.

The cracks on the wood start growing with the cries of the creature inside; the shell opens up with creaks and squeals until a tuft of something reddish and soft pops out in between the breaches.

“Is it fur?” Gon asks, anxious, and Ging sticks a hand in to remove some wooden flakes and help the creature come out.

It’s not fur. But it does have a tail.

“Looks like now that tea would be a good idea,” Mister Satotz says, when it’s clear that everybody else has lost their words.

*

Satotz placed a big, silver teapot in the middle of his desk and they gathered around it like it was a fireplace. Gon is sitting on a dusty pink armchair, Kite squealing in his arms.

“Doesn’t he look bigger? I think he looks bigger,” he says, trying to gauge the length of his head with a thumb.

“He does look a bit bigger, the tail looks longer for sure,” Killua confirms. He’s peeking over his shoulder from his roosted position on the backseat of the armchair.

“Do you think he’ll remember us?” Gon asks, anxious, but maybe it’s a pointless question.

Ging clears his throat as Mito glares at him over the rim of her teacup.

“Difficult to tell,” he says, and goes to sit on the desk itself because the last bit of space was taken by Razor’s massive legs; he’s placed them on a century-old pouf with lion’s pawns.

“So,” Mito starts, brows furrowed and voice firm. “It’s not like I’m expecting any kind of explanation, but at least a ‘what now’ plan would be nice. Kite is a small rat-baby. There’s a runaway magical kid—sorry, dear,” she adds, talking to a dumbstruck Killua, “and I understand that your shop has been trashed by a malevolent wizard of some kind.”

“He’s been taken care of,” Razor says, smiling. The teacup is ridiculously tiny between his fingers.

Killua is still clutching at the teapot, but he tries to sit a bit more comfortably when Gon shifts to make some space for him.

“It’s sorcerers, not wizards. And there are at least half a million things that don’t make sense. First of all, what the heck are you,” he says, and he’s scrutinizing Ging. “You shouldn’t even be possible, you’re human—”

Ging blinks at him like he didn’t understand the question.

“Well, I found that teapot some years ago, you see? Actually, exactly thirteen years ago. And then I wished to be able to do magic myself.”

Mister Satotz’s blinking is the most educated reaction. Gon hears himself yelping and aunt Mito groans so hard that Kite’s own squeals sound low for a change.

“Of course you did,” she says, breathing hard, nostrils flailing.

Ging shrugs.

“Well, that was basically all I wanted, so I went a bit crazy with the other wishes. I asked for every magical object I find to become untraceable by magical means, so the teapot itself is too. Then I finished up my wishes and it vanished.”

“That’s what it does,” Killua says, pensive. “Wait, so that’s why I couldn’t conjure it or apparate where it was?”

“But you still teleported—I mean, apparated,” Gon corrects himself before some veins in Killua’s head pop, “to me. So what about that?”

Killua opens his mouth, then shuts it. And frowns.

“It’s probably because of Alluka,” he says, looking at the teapot. “I wasn’t searching for the teapot itself, but for Alluka… long story,” he adds, lips clipped even in front of various degrees of worry. “Ging’s wish must have derailed me, I ended up being in the place or, in this case, with the person where the teapot was supposed to be, but too early.”

Mito looks at her tea, tired.

“None of this makes any sense. And what about the third wish? You said there was a third wish, which I guess makes sense since we apparently operate like a fairy tale.”

Ging is sipping at his tea, legs crossed.

“Well, I wished for Gon. I thought it would have been nice to have a son.”

Gon blinks. Twice. He isn’t sure if that sound was coming from his own throat, but maybe it was Aunt Mito, choking on her tea.

“What?” There’s a giant bubble, an underwater explosion taking place inside Gon’s skull. For a whole, long second the only thing that makes sense is Killua’s hand on his shoulder, cool and stable while the world spins.

When Ging starts laughing, Mito has already poured her remaining tea on his face.

“I’m kidding, just kidding!” he squeaks; he fell on the floor at some point—Mito must have kicked him. He raises both hands. “Heck, you’re way too serious, of course it’s a joke!”

Gon breathes out, but Killua is still watching both him and Ging like a hawk.

The giant grandfather clock strikes five—maybe six? times from the shadowy bulk of the furniture stocked in the room. 

Kite looks even bigger than one minute ago, solid and light in Gon’s arms. He’s fidgeting, so Gon offers him a finger to grab; he does so with a fiery strength in those tiny sausages. His eyes are pinkish like those of a rat, and maybe Gon is just confused and tired and projecting, but he knows animals way more than he knows babies—and he knows Kite, way more than he knows Ging. There’s recognition in those pupils, curious as they take his face in, analyzing.

“Goh,” the little creature says, with what seems to be extreme satisfaction. “Goh, goh.”

Of course that’s not a word, just as it isn’t a name, but it sounds alright. Maybe Gon’s a wish and Kite’s a baby female rat, but the sun has risen, casting light over the sparkly dust laying around Satotz’s shop, and Gon really feels like everything is going to be fine somewhat.

*

Abe cooked pasta for everybody and warmed up a bottle of milk for Kite. At the end of the meal, he was already trying to munch some bread all by himself, sitting upright without any help from Gon.

Then Killua dared to yawn and Aunt Mito decided it was time for everyone to just go to sleep, at ten in the morning sharp. Gon collapsed on his bed, head empty and full at the same time.

He doesn’t remember when exactly he fell asleep, but now the sun is gone and the cicadas are chirping loud outside. He turns, mattress wobbling under his weight, plaster cast heavy and arm itchy whatever the position.

He springs up, breath caught in his throat, but here they are, Killua and Nanika, both sleeping on the futon. 

Killua tried to go, blabbering some nonsense about impositions and hospitality. Aunt Mito answered by lending him Gon’s clothes and asking about his favorite dish. He blushed and no one could actually make sense of what he said—but he stayed, face wary, shoulders tense and Nanika’s hand clasped in his. She barely speaks, but she always says Killua’s name like it’s her favorite word in the whole world.

Now Killua’s fingers are tangled inside Nanika’s hair and her hand is grabbing at the fabric of his too green shirt. They placed the teapot on top of their pillow; it stands out with its yellow dots even in the darkish room.

Gon studies them from above and feels like he’s intruding into something he still hasn’t quite grasped—something that’s none of his business. He’s out of it and it’s a somber thought; it makes him feel less corporeal. Everything has been quite dreamy, to be honest.

He tosses the sheet aside and stumbles down the bed. The floorboards creak, but if Killua wakes up, he doesn’t say anything.

The stairs creak too; sometimes Gon forgets that he isn’t on Whale Island, where the ocean was always so loud that no other sound was heard at night. Here headlights of passing cars flash from window to window and the sea is too far to be heard.

Kite is sleeping comfortably on the couch, hair way longer than it was in the morning. He looks like a three-year-old already, maybe he’s going to become as tall as he was by the end of the week. Ging doesn’t know and Kite himself doesn’t seem to care; he insisted on playing with a wooden spoon like it was a sword while Mito and Abe searched for kids clothes inside forgotten boxes. They’ll have to search better tomorrow, so Kite got stuck with one of Gon’s t-shirts as a dress, his tail swinging lazily down the couch.

Gon lets the door swing on its hinges and gets out, padding barefoot on the grass. There's a light coming from the treehouse; he climbs inside unannounced to find Ging there, sitting on the floor like he was waiting for him, sleeping bag tossed aside and one of Gon’s maps spread open in front of his crossed leg.

“This is pretty good. Did you draw it?”

“I like drawing, but Kite helped,” Gon says.

Ging is busy tracing the lines on the paper with a slight frown. He sighs and lifts his eyes, folding back the map with care.

“Mito is cruel.” He gestures vaguely at his sleeping arrangement; Mito didn’t even give him a pillow.

Gon sits cross-legged in front of him. 

“She isn’t. She could have told you to go away. And the treehouse is pretty comfortable, I sleep here often.”

Ging studies him like he’s a curious kind of insect. It’s not an unpleasant feeling, overall.

He shakes his head; without the turban Ging’s hair really looks like Gon’s own.

“Of course you do. You know, I’m not…”

“I know,” Gon says. He grins. “You were saying that you’re not going to stay, right? That’s okay. I understand. I think I would go to lots of places too if I was an adult. I think I will, when I finish school.”

“That’s a good resolution, Gon.”

“So, you’re a wizard now, right?” Gon asks, eyes attracted by the window of his own bedroom. He can’t see even a bit of Killua from there, just his empty bed and the closed door.

Ging wrinkles his nose. He's still wearing too many clothes for this weather, but doesn’t look hot in the slightest.

“Book,” he says, and a book appears with a pop, just like that, floating mid-air before Gon’s gaping mouth. Ging is smirking.

“Let’s see… it’s pretty dark in here. Yeah, this will do.” He flips the pages, unfazed, and a glassy orb, brighter than the flashlight, grows right above their heads, like a small sun casting flickering shadows all around.

“Magic, you see?” The light makes Ging’s grin even brighter. “Normally human can’t do magic, but that spirit—”

“Nanika.”

“Yes, Nanika. She didn’t look like that when I got to know her, by the way. She was more like a bubble of gas.” He shrugs like the whole thing doesn’t really concern him. “Anyway, she gave me the closest thing, you see? It’s a grimoire, I can store spells inside. Pretty cool, uh?”

Gon is in awe; he sticks his neck out to get a closer look. It's a plain-looking book, nothing extremely fancy, but whatever is written inside, it's in a language Gon doesn't know. Cool.

He mirrors Ging's grin. 

“Yeah! And that makes you a wizard! So people can become wizards, this is awesome!”

“I guess. You should ask for one. You still have one wish, right?”

Gon frowns.

“Yeah, but—I already know what to ask. I want Kite to get his old body back.”

He didn’t exactly expect a reaction, but Ging frowns.

“That’s not your decision to make.”

“But I thought…”

“Let’s just ask Kite, then,” Ging says, simple like that, and Gon finds himself nodding at his shadow, spread thin on the wooden floor.

“I guess.”

“Listen, Gon,” Ging starts again, wary, a finger scratching at the side of his nose. “If you want to know about your mother…”

The cicadas are really loud tonight. Gon likes that sound a lot, if he concentrates really hard, it’s almost like they’re still on Whale Island. 

“Thanks, but no, thanks. I mean… Aunt Mito and Abe raised me and Mito did all the things moms are supposed to do. She really is awesome, I like her a lot. So… yeah, I don’t really care who my mother is, I already have one.”

Ging is looking at him, eyes open wide.

“Was that too harsh?”

“Definitely harsh,” Ging blurts and then laughs, so hard that Gon needs to fan him. “And fair. I’m… It’s way better like this, that would have been an awkward conversation anyway. Apparently, leaving you to Mito has been another one of my awesome ideas. Great move, I’m a genius.”

Gon half laughs, half frowns. 

A genius, uh? He looks at the house from the tree, and yes—maybe Ging isn’t a genius, but that sure had been a great move.

It must be pretty early in the evening; Killua’s storm has left quite the pleasant breezy air and Gon is honestly wide awake at this point.

The light orb is pushing the shadows toward the walls, under the old trunk Gon uses to store whatever stuff Aunt Mito shouldn’t see or deemed too messy to enter the house.

“Lost something?” Ging asks, when Gon is already giving him his back while he searches inside, head buried between unfinished maps and art supplies. He picks up the decks of cards, old but still in top condition inside their see-through envelopes.

Ging blinks.

“That’s—you know, some of those are worth a lot. First edition and all that.”

Gon shrugs and hands him a deck.

“I guess. Let’s play?”

Ging scoffs, but he’s already shuffling his deck. 

“You dare to challenge a game master? Don’t think I’ll go easy on you, kid.”

A cool uncle. That’s what Ging feels like: a cool uncle.

Gon mirrors his grin behind his hand—a bit too many lands, but not bad overall.

“I won’t go easy on you too, Ging!” 

After all, playing Greed Island was pretty much everything he wanted to do if he ever got to know his father.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Endings aren't my strongest suit but i tried my best XD Thank you for reading this far, I hope it was a fun ride!

Gon isn’t sure what he was expecting—to cry, maybe? But it’s a bright, warm mid-morning outside and birds are chirping. 

The office is clean, bureaucracy neatly packed in folders and placed on shelves. The lady behind the desk is talking, voice low and respectful, but Gon's whole attention is focused on Kite, who's now a small heap of grey-ish ashes inside a neatly sealed plastic bag.

“This is pretty unusual.” The woman’s eyes shift on Gon and her frown deepens when she takes in Kite’s new body, big pink irises and fiery red-head. “I mean, we usually operate through the mediation of a funeral home, not, uhm, family members. You have very cute children,” she adds.

Mito and Ging deadpan simultaneously and they’re still sputtering when Kite says “actually, those are my remains”, shrill voice and big eyes. Abe insisted on dressing him up with one of Mito’s old sundresses; he looks ready for a tea-party with stuffed animals and Nanika.

The cemetery-lady looks honestly freaked out, but she keeps her face politely professional as she explains what paper they must sign before they can put the ashes away inside the urn and take it home.

“Try to act like an adult,” Mito growls, when she has to grab at Ging’s closest earlobe to prevent him from leaving her to do all the adulting by herself.

Gon definitely feels like a kid and that’s enough to decide he needs _out_. He isn’t even sure why he insisted on coming, everything is so silly—so surreal.

Killua’s storm has left some broken branches and some bent trees even there on the other side of the city, but summer has come back full force. Still one whole month before school; one month of blue skies and clouds like whipped cream; of that weighty, itchy cast on his arm.

Kite’s hand is tiny wrapped inside Gon’s own. The skirt is definitely too big, rustling on the cobblestones, small shoes tickling as he tries to keep up the pace.

“Wouldn’t you prefer other clothes?” Gon inquires, curious.

Kite’s red-head shakes a bit, thoughtful expression in place as they walk out of the ungraceful metal gate of the cemetery.

“I don’t really mind, clothes are just clothes,” he says, and then turns to look at his trail. “And the skirt is useful to hide the tail, at least.”

“And you’re really totally sure you don’t want to… I mean, Nanika could do it. Killua says she can do almost anything, he wouldn’t lie. And Ging agrees too.”

Kite sighs, grave expression so out of place on his small face.

“It was a miscalculation on my part, I knew that what I was carrying was quite valuable but I let myself be found,” he says, with his thoughtful, childish voice. “And, anyway, it could have been way worse, this body isn’t that bad. I’m so not looking forward to menstrual cramps, but I’m kinda looking forward to boobs, eventually. That should be interesting.”

It probably is, but Gon wouldn’t really know. He’s never been interested in boobs anyway, so he limits himself to a shrug and they wait for Mito and Ging to come back with the urn.

Back at home, Abe is waiting with half a batch of chocolate cookies. The first one is already inside Killua’s stomach, who’s combing dough out of Nanika’s hair with the care of an attentive nanny.

“Well, it’s been as awkward as we expected,” Mito tells everybody, even if it was more of a collective flail of eyebrows than an actual question. Ging places the urn on the table, right beside the baking tray, and Mito sizes it up with a scowl.

She says “we should just throw it in the trash” and Gon’s blood becomes a slimy snake, cold as it tries to choke him.

“I’ll take care of it!” He picks it up with his good hand, trying to balance it on the cast. “It’s… It was Kite! I mean. It’s—”

“Sure,” Mito tells him, eyes softer. “Sorry, that was insensitive of me.”

Gon doesn’t know what to do—smile at her? He just nods and sprints on the stairs to get to his room. The air is hot like a swollen bruise despite the open window. He closes the door and places the urn on his desk, thoughtful. He doesn’t know if that’s the place, but he thinks he’d need to look at it sometime, as a reminder. 

He isn’t sure of what exactly, but something _did_ happen. Kite is alive, but Gon just can’t forget the exact moment when something broke inside his head, inside his chest. Like a rip in the fabric, and he’s still not sure how to stitch it back; it still pulses somewhat, it makes him shiver. He closes the window.

“Yes?” he asks, to the closed door. He didn’t hear any footsteps; when the door slides on its rails, he’s already smiling because of course there’s Killua’s face there, wary like he’s been since he first put a foot inside the house.

Nanika is following him like a colorful shadow as he tiptoes inside, wary.

“So, uh, Nanika and I were thinking… This will cheer you up,” he says, and he's weighing the teapot in his hands, a confident expression in place. “You still have one wish, remember? It’s yours.”

Of course he would. Gon feels the ache under his ribs subside to an itch and he knows he's smiling when he bounces on the bed, beckoning Killua to come closer.

“Yes. I thought about it a lot actually.”

“Did you?” Killua says, but he sounds vague, indifferent. He’s trying really hard to sound indifferent and Gon grins at him, wide and sure, because he really thought about it a lot and he talked with Kite, and it _feels_ right.

“Yes. And my wish is to fulfill your wish, Killua, so… What was it? You never really told me. I want to know. I want to know everything about you.”

Killua's eyes widen before he diverts them, one hand raised to scratch at his cheek.

“It’s mostly garbage,” he blurts. “It’s mostly garbage and dirty blood magic and—you already wished for Illumi to leave us alone, I never even dared to think about asking for that. It’s way more than enough, I can’t ask you to—”

“Then I won’t make any wish at all,” Gon says. “So Nanika will be able to stay with you, right? Isn’t that what you want?”

Killua’s face scrunches.

“Yes. No. For Satan’s sake—you’re impossible.” He lets himself fall on the bed and the mattress bounces under his spread out weight. “How can you be so—” Gon doesn’t know what he wants to say; Killua is looking at him behind the shield of his own arm, like the sunlight is blinding him.

“Ging said that Nanika was different. When he asked for his wishes thirteen years ago, she didn’t look like this,” Gon starts again, looking at her. She’s smiling, hands rested on her knees while she sits too, corporeal and incorporeal at the same time. “He said you were more like a cloud… like gas.”

Nanika smiles and Killua props himself on his elbows, lips shut tight.

“You know… We don’t really know what Nanika is,” he says then, and she smiles even more when Killua reaches out to pet her on the head. “One of my relatives got back from a trip some years ago with that teapot. We were kids back then, so I don’t really remember what the hell we were doing, but we opened the teapot and—we didn’t know about the wishes. The thing inside answered us… Nanika isn’t evil, she just likes to grant wishes because she wants to be praised. She’s just… She’s a kid, she wants to play and Alluka and I… We just wanted to play too. But Nanika took a liking to Alluka and, well...”

“So Alluka is inside the pot?”

“Yes and no. This is Alluka. Her body, at least.”

Gon looks at the long, silky hair and yes, those look a lot like Illumi’s own hair and maybe there is something that reminds of Killua in her features too, even if it’s difficult to see, what with the black hollow eyes and that creepy cavity as a mouth.

The truth shows way more in the way Killua talks to her; the way he touches her—like she’s something precious; like aunt Mito used to ruffle Gon’s hair when he was younger, pinching his cheeks for no reason at all.

There’s frustration in Killua’s voice; he's glaring at the teapot when Gon picks it up.

“That’s why—my family just decided that Alluka was gone, but I know she’s still there. And I want her back, but I don’t want to banish Nanika either and—this stupid teapot, I wanted to get rid of it. It’s just a mess. As long as it exists, Nanika will be bound to it and she’ll have to grant wishes, but she doesn’t need to do that, I can take care of her myself.”

“I understand. That’s easy then,” Gon says, and he’s already lifted the lid. Nanika’s face jumps up, eyes glued to his.

“Gon—”

“It’s okay, I think I got it now. Nanika! I want both you and Alluka to be two normal people with their own bodies! How does this sound?”

Nanika blinks. Her smile isn’t that creepy overall—or maybe it was, but not anymore, her face has already changed, her pitch-black irises pretty common inside her big, slanted eyes, just like Killua’s own. Gon can’t really look at them that close, because then the weight of the pot grows suddenly into a heap of clothes and limbs and hair that knocks him down the bed and falls with him on the floor, squealing.

Gon's broken arm hits the nightstand and the pain is so intense for a whole second that he’s going to pass out.

When Gon opens his eyes once again, three pairs are looking from above, and two of them are blue.

“Sorry,” Alluka says, still sitting on top of his chest. She doesn’t move, she looks at her hands—her fingers are trembling—and then at Killua; the resemblance is striking. “And thank you,” she adds, but it isn’t clear who she's talking to, then, as she starts crying a river.

“Oh dear,” Abe says, overlooking from the door. “Lunch is ready, but I think we’ll have to buy another set of flatware. And make some more dough for the cookies,” she decides, like then the matter is set.

* 

Aunt Mito is awesome in lots of ways; being unfazed in front of the odd is just one of many.

“So, you’re Alluka—”

“She’s Nanika,” Alluka says, and points at the black irises of her identical twin. “I’m Alluka!”

Mito inhales and exhales.

“Right, sorry. Alluka, Nanika,” she repeats, shifting from one to the other. “Do you like spaghetti?” Nanika looks at Alluka who then turns to look at Killua, who just looks at a loss.

"Is there someone in the universe who doesn't like spaghetti?" 

“Spaghetti it is,” Mito decides then, and hands out affectionate pats on everybody’s head. Gon’s too, even if she already knew he likes spaghetti.

Maybe she’s like that because she grew up with Abe or around Ging, but Gon suspects that she’s also awesome just because she is; the way she directs the house like a conductor, no matter if it’s just to make Gon do his homework or stage a lunch for estranged family members and magical creatures alike.

A couple of saucepans and nine minutes later she’s shoving a plastic plate on the coffee table. The heap of spaghetti wobbles, splattering a bit of sauce on Ging’s face, but he doesn’t move.

“Thanks,” he says instead. Mito made him sit on the floor with Kite, who’s now learning to operate cutlery and couldn’t reach the actual table. Still, Mito gave him a pillow to sit on, a bigger portion than Ging's and an actual plate. Kite looks positively adorable while he tries to convince his tiny fingers to grab the fork correctly and without splattering tomato sauce all over the bib Abe tied around his neck. It used to be Gon’s, there’s smiling frogs all over it.

Kite smiles at him—one of those crooked, tightlipped smiles he used to give him all the time, and Gon feels a bit better.

When he turns to grab his own fork, Killua is trying to teach Nanika to use her own only for her to insist on picking up spaghetti with her hands.

“Actually, kids, that’s how they were usually eaten before the sixteenth century,” Ging says, which is pretty interesting, but also more than enough to make Mito’s fork screech on the plate.

“Thank goodness you’re here to provide us with useless trivia. Since you’ve never provided for anything else,” she barks, stabbing her plate with vengeance.

They start bickering back and forth while Kite hums the jingle of some cleaning product commercial. Abe is asking Alluka what’s her favorite color because she wants to knit her a sweater despite still being thirty degrees in the shade. Nanika is just piling up pasta on top of her own head at this point.

Gon’s eyes meet Killua’s on the other side of the table. They grin at each other until Nanika decides that Killua too is in dire need of a spaghetti-hat and tomato sauce starts plopping on his forehead too.

*

“You should at least help with the dishes,” Mito says, when they’re already all collected in front of the door.

Ging smiles awkwardly, a battered bag on his shoulder.

“It looks to me that you've got things covered, Mito. There’s no need for us to stay here any longer.”

“Of course, it’s not like you have a son who is also a minor,” Mito says, as dry as the hot summery air.

Ging has the decency to cough and blush a bit. Kite sighs, looking like a small mannequin for child clothes inside green overalls and small boots.

“Well, have a safe trip then. Are you sure you’re going to be fine?” Gon asks, and Kite nods. He’s almost Alluka’s height already but it doesn’t look like he’s going to grow up at the same mad pace of the first days. Weird. His tail still looks awesome.

“I can still keep my own, don’t worry. Sorry that our weekend wasn’t as fun as I promised. Next time, I hope I’ll be tall enough to come with you on a roller coaster.”

Gon beams.

“Or we could do something magical instead.”

“Haven’t you got enough of that already?” Mito growls—she just doesn’t get it.

“Of course not! Magic is awesome!” Gon says, sure, and Ging nods solemnly.

“Of course it is. Bye Gon. Bye Mito,” he adds and she growls so hard it’s audible even after the door closes behind their backs and Aunt Mito lets out the biggest sighs of all.

“Well,” she says, and sizes Gon and Killua up from their bare feet to the top of their heads. “Gon, you can definitely help with the dishes. And you three need a shower,” she adds, diverting sharp eyes toward Killua, Alluka and Nanika’s hair, still dripping tomato sauce.

“She’s super scary,” Killua says, waving at his sisters as they’re both dragged inside the bathroom. He chose to stay and help Gon with the dishes instead; it helps that he also knows how to vanish some of the dirt with a snap of his fingers—and Gon need to check his grammar because he was pretty sure that vanish wasn’t a transitive verb before. Magical words are magical.

“You know, Ging never told what he really wished for,” Killua says, when they’ve already attacked the tower of dirty dishes.

Gon feels a bit useless down one arm, but he would have been even with both in working order: Killua has jinxed the sponge to lather the plates so that the only thing left to do is watch them rinse themselves as they flip under the faucet in an orderly line. Gon climbs on the table to get a better look at the whole show.

“So you don’t think that I’m a wish, right?” he asks, studying the growing heap of suds inside the sink.

Killua is leaning beside the sink. He taps his chin with one finger, dishes forgotten.

“I don’t know. He may be crazy enough. I mean—no offense.”

“None taken,” Gon says, and Killua nods. They listen to the water hitting on the plates, the squishy sound of the sponge rubbing them clean.

Gon ends up swinging his legs, and observing Killua. He’s still sporting splotches of dried out sauce on his face, on his hair. He doesn’t look that much different from the first time they met, disheveled and covered in a red, slimy substance. And yet, Gon has never seen him happier.

“Say, Killua, can I ask you something?” And of course Killua’s reaction is narrowing his eyes, already on the defense. Gon grins. “It’s just… I’d like to make a wish for myself, if you don’t mind. Since in the end I didn’t really get one.”

“Uh, yeah, sorry about that. But Nanika won’t grant any more wishes, you know that.”

Gon nods, sure, and Killua is definitely confused, now.

“Yeah, but I don’t need Nanika for this. I am asking you.”

He scoffs and the plates clutter as he gestures vaguely at himself.

“I’m just a common sorcerer, and a pretty clumsy one judging by this whole thing…”

Gon shakes his head so fast he’s going to fall from the table; he grabs at the edge with all his functioning fingers.

“You’re an awesome sorcerer! But I’m not asking you as one. I’m asking you as a friend.”

There’s a minor pileup right in front of the faucet and one of the plates falls inside the sink with a loud clank. Killua swallows, cheeks tinted pink.

“Oh. Okay then. I mean, shoot.”

Gon inhales.

“Would you stay with me, Killua? Just… You have fun when we are together, right?”

“Uh, I guess?” Killua says, after a too-long pause. He shakes his head. “I mean, yeah, I have fun when we’re—”

Gon jumps down the table and he grabs at his hand. The plates fall down in sync.

“Then let’s just stick together! Alluka and Nanika too… Please, Killua! Stay with me!”

“Well… I mean, Alluka is just a normal kid and Nanika hasn’t her power anymore, so. I guess that it doesn’t really matter where we go?” Killua says, like the words are floating out of his mouth spontaneously; just like the water that’s started to overflow from the sink.

“Yes! You can live inside my treehouse! I bet Aunt Mito wouldn’t mind. It’s gonna be awesome—and you can help me with math!”

Killua’s eyes are huge. He blinks, mouth agape.

“Gon, I can’t do math. Wait, I mean, we can’t live inside a treehouse, we’re not monkeys… Gon?”

He can hear his protest in the background, but Gon has already run out of the kitchen, leaving a wet trail behind him.

“Aunt Mito, can Killua live inside my treehouse?” he yells at the bathroom door.

A loud sigh resounds over running water and giggles, and Gon takes it as a yes.

*

Airplanes are out of discussion, thank you very much, so Ging makes do with a transportation spell.

They apparate in the middle of a jungle and Kite isn’t even properly angry about it.

“Well, all’s well that ends well,” it’s what Ging says first, dusting his pants off—pretty useless since he’s always covered in dust anyway.

“I’ve been reborn as a small child, Ging, how is all well?”

Ging ruffles his hair, grin bright on his face.

“Oh, come oh, that looks like an interesting experience! You’ve said it yourself—”

“For Gon’s sake, yes,” Kite rebuts, but it’s useless, isn’t it? Ging is already studying his surroundings with one of those manic expressions that don’t bode well. “You’re a good guy, Kite. And, anyway, if you really want to fix the problem, we’re already in the right place!”

Right. This doesn’t bode well _at all_.

“Where the heck are we, actually. I thought you said we were going to Kakin.” His own voice sounds silly to his ears, so small and thin. He must be a masochist: there’s no other possible explanation for his acquaintance with Ging Freecs.

“It’s exactly where we are! At least I hope, my calculation should be right,” Ging says, mumbling over the rim of his grimoire before letting it vanish with a flick of his hand. “I heard that around here grows a pretty interesting fungus that has the property of making people grow up in one night! Aren’t you interested?”

The jungle is rustling in the background in the most menacing of ways. Kite tilts an eyebrow.

“You heard some crazy story and now you want me to act as a guinea pig just so you can satisfy your curiosity, right?”

Ging doesn’t even have the decency to look sorry.

“Maybe?”

Kite groans, and it sounds like the whining of a small child—which he is. Jesus.

“Maybe you should be the one to try that mushroom and see if you can finally grow up a bit. Jeez, I really hope Gon grows up to be better than you,” he says, and he’s stepping up already: better get a head start, with those new short legs he’s got.

Ging hums to himself. He doesn’t look offended, not even in the slightest.

“He already is, don’t you think?” he says, walking through the underwood like he’s strolling on a comfortable path. “It’s the betterment of the breeding and all that jazz.”

Useless. Kite shakes his head—he kinda misses his hat, that’s the first thing he should buy when—no, _if_ —they manage to get back to civilization in one piece. The jungle is rustling and screeching all around, deep shadows cut in halves by blinding beams of light from above and maybe, maybe Kite should have stopped trying to be a good man and taken that wish instead. He lets Ging pick him up when they have to leap over a big old fallen trunk.

“Ging,” he asks then, sitting on his shoulders. “You didn’t really wish for a son, right?”

Kite can’t see his face from up there, just the crown of his messy hair. He’d really like to just pick at his brain, sometimes. 

Ging’s laugh is both a scoff and a wheeze and Kite finds himself crossing his eyes. He hits him on the head with one of his tiny fists.

“Ging!”

“Come on! Wouldn’t that be interesting enough to try?” Ging is—he can’t be serious. Knowing him, he probably is. “I mean, magic cannot restore life, but can it create one from scratch? I mean, where are the boundaries truly? That’s a pretty compelling question, isn’t it?”

“Ging, tell me you didn’t ask a magical entity to give you a son!”

Ging sighs really hard.

“Okay, right. I’ll tell you. I didn’t ask a magical entity to give me a son.”

Unbelievable.

“Are you telling the truth?”

He sighs again, even louder, and Kite is this close to just strangling him—he’s actually in a favorable position. But of course Ging is already over that, launched toward the next thing that interests him, steps sure as he walks forward, always forward and without a compass.

“This conversation isn’t going anywhere, Kite. Let’s talk about that mushroom instead! They say there’s actually a good chance for it to be deadly poisonous, but…”

**Author's Note:**

> Now with super cool illustrations by [desolatesandwich](https://desolatesandwich.tumblr.com/post/622515951541338112/artwork-for-2020-hunterxhunter-big-bang-based-on). Don't be like me, read the captions! XD


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